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Photo A'. F. Herald 



WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING 



THE MIRRORS OF 
WASHINGTON 



ANONYMOUS 



JiX^lr^^J^ ULuiAJCoin/ (Aj'O^ 



With Fourteen Cartoons by 
GESARE 

and Fourteen Portraits 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

xrbe Iknicherbocfter press 

1921 



/TV 4-7 

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^46 



Copyright, 1921 

by 

G. P. Putnam's Sons 

Printed in the United States of America 



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CONTENTS 

WITH BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 

HARDING, Warren G., 

President of the United States; b. Corsica, Morrow 
Co., O., Nov. 2, 1865; Educ. student of Ohio 
Central Coll. (now defunct), Iberia, 1879-82; 
engaged in newspaper business at Marion, O., 
since 1884; pres. Harding Pub. Co., pubs. Star 
(daily); mem. Ohio Senate, 1900-4; It. -gov. of 
Ohio, 1904-6; Rep. nominee for gov. of Ohio, 
1910 (defeated); mem. U. S. Senate, from Ohio, 
19 1 5-21; Baptist; President of the United States, 
1921 ........ 

WILSON, Woodrow, 

Twenty-eighth President of the United States; b. 
Staunton, Va., Dec. 28, 1856; Educ. Davidson 
Coll., N. C, 1874-5; A.B., Princeton, 1879, A.M., 
1882; grad. in law, U. of Va., 1881; post-grad, 
work at Johns Hopkins, 1883-5, Ph.D., 1886; 
(LL.D., Wake Forest, 1887, Tulane, 1898, Johns 
Hopkins, 1902, Rutgers, 1902, U. of Pa., 1903, 
Brown, 1903; Harvard, 1907, Williams, 1908, 
Dartmouth, 1909; Litt.D., Yale, 1901); pres. Aug. 
I, 1902-Oct. 20, 1910, Princeton U.; gov. of N. J., 
Jan. 17, 1911-Mar. I, 1913 (resigned); nominated 

iii 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



for President in Dem. Nat. Conv. Baltimore, 1912, 
and elected Nov. 4, 1912, for term, Mar. 4, 1913- 
Mar. 4, 191 7; renominated for President in Dem. 
Nat. Conv., St. Louis, 1916, and reelected, Nov. 
7, 1916; for term Mar. 4, 1917-Mar. 4, 1921; Left 
for France on the troopship George Washington, 
Dec. 4, 1918, at the head of Am. Commn. to Negoti- 
ate Peace; returned to U. S., arriving in Boston, 
Feb. 24, 1919; left New York on 2d trip to Europe, 
Mar. 5; arrived in Paris, Mar. 14; signed Peace 
Treaty, June 28, 1919 ..... 25 

HARVEY, George (Brinton McClellan), 

Editor; b. Peacham, Vt., Feb. 16, 1864; Educ. 
Peacham Academy; (LL.D., University of Ne- 
vada, University of Vermont, Middlebury Coll. 
and Erskine Coll.). Consecutively reporter 
Springfield Republican, Chicago News, and New 
York World, 1882-6; ins. commr. of N. J., 1 890-1 ; 
mng. editor New York World, 1891-93; con- 
structor and pres. various electric railroads, 1894- 
8; purchased, 1899, and since editor North Ameri- 
can Review, Pres. Harper & Bros., 1900-15; North 
Am. Review Pub. Co., 1899- ; editor and pub. 
Harvey's Weekly; dir. Audit Co. of New York 
Col. and a.-d.-c. on staffs of Govs. Green and 
Abbett, of N. J., 1885-92; hon. col. and a.-d.-c. on 
staffs of Govs. Heyward and Ansel, of S. C. ; U. S. 
Ambassador to Court of Saint James . . 49 

HUGHES, Charles Evans, 

Secretary of State; b. at Glens Falls, N. Y., Apr. 11, 
1862; Educ. Colgate U., 1876-8; A.B., Brown U., 

iv 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



1881, A.M., 1884; LL.B., Columbia, 1884; (LL.D., 
Brown, 1906, Columbia, Knox, and Lafayette, 1907, 
Union, Colgate, 1908, George Washington, 1909, 
Williams College, Harvard, and Univ. of Penn- 
sylvania, 1910, Yale Univ., 1915); admitted to 
N. Y. bar, 1884; prize fellowship, Columbia Law 
Sch., 1884-7; nominated for office of mayor of 
New York by Rep. Conv., 1905, but declined; gov. 
of N. Y. 2 terms, Jan. i, 1907-Dec. 31, 1908, Jan. 
I, 1909-Dec. 31, 1910; resigned, Oct. 6, 1910; 
apptd., May 2, 1910, and Oct. 10, 1910, became 
asso. justice Supreme Court of U. S.; nominated 
for President of U. S. in Rep. Nat. Conv., Chicago, 
June 10, 19 1 6, and resigned from Supreme Court 
same day; Secretary ot State, 1 92 1 ... 67 

HOUSE, Edward Mandell, 

B. Houston, Tex., July 26, 1858; Educ. Hopkins 
Grammar Sch., New Haven, Conn., 1877; Cornell 
U., 1 881; active in Dem. councils, state and na- 
tional, but never a candidate for office. Personal 
representative of President Wilson to the Euro- 
pean governments in 1914, 1915, and 191 6; apptd. 
by the President, Sept., 191 7, to gather and or- 
ganize data necessary at the eventual peace con- 
ference; commd. as the special rep. of Govt, of 
U. S. at the Inter- Allied Conference of Premiers 
and Foreign Ministers, held in Paris, Nov. 29, 
191 7, to effect a more complete coordination of 
the activities of the Entente cobelligerents for 
the prosecution of the war; designated by the 
President to represent the U. S. in the Supreme 
War Council at Versailles, Dec. i, 1917; Oct. 17, 
191 8; designated by the President to act for the 



CONTENTS 1 

PAGE 

U. S. in the negotiation of the Armistice with the I 

Central Powers; mem. Am. Commn. to Negotiate 

Peace, 1918-19. ...... 89 \ 

HOOVER, Herbert Clark, j 

Secretaryof Commerce; Engineer; b. West Branch, la., ' 

Aug. 10, 1874; Educ. B.A. (in mining engring.), Le- ; 

land Stanford, Jr., U., 1895; (LL.D., Brown U., U. ■ 

of Pa., Harvard, Princeton, Yale, OberHn, U. of Ala., ij 

Li^ge, Brussels; D.C.L., Oxford); Asst. Ark. Geol. ] 

Survey, 1893, U. S. Geol. Survey, Sierra Nevada j 

Mountains, 1 895 ; in W. Australia as chief of mining j 

staff of Bewick, Moreing & Co. and mgr. Han- j 

nan's Brown Hill Mine, 1897; chief engr. Chinese ] 

Imperial Bur. of Mines, 1899, doing extensive ' 
exploration in interior of China. Tool: part in 

defense of Tientsin during Boxer disturbances; ^ 

Chmn. Am. Rehef Com. London, 1914-15, i 

Commn. for Relief in Belgium, 1915-18; chmn. ] 
food com. Council of Nat. Defense, Apr. -Aug. 

191 7; apptd. U. S. food administrator by President i 

Wilson, Aug. 10, 1917, resigned June, 1919. ■ 

Secretary of Commerce, 192 1 .... 107 l 

LODGE, Henr>' Cabot, j 

Senator; b. Boston, May 12, 1850; Educ. A.B., Har- \ 

vard, 1871, LL.B., 1875, Ph.D. (history), 1876; | 

(LL.D., Williams, 1893, Yale, 1902, Clark U., ] 

1902, Harvard, 1904, Amherst, 1912, also Union ^ 



Col., Princeton U., and Dartmouth Coll., and 
Brown, 1918) ; Admitted to bar, 1876; editor North 
American Review, 1873-6, International Review, 
1879-81 ; mem. Mass. Ho. of Rep., 1880, 81 ; mem. 

vi 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



50th to 53d Congresses (1887-93), 6th Mass. 
Dist.; U. S. senator, since 1893; mem. Alaskan 
Boundary Tribunal, 1903; mem. U. S. Immi- 
gration Commn., 1907 ..... 129 

BARUCH, Bernard Mannes, 

Educ. A.B., Coll. City of New York, 1889; mem. of 
New York Stock Exchange many yrs.; apptd., 
19 1 6, by Pres. Wilson, mem. Advisory Commn. of 
Council Nat. Defense; was made chmn. Com. on 
Raw Materials, Minerals and Metals, also commr. 
in charge of purchasing for the War Industries 
Bd., and mem. commn. in charge of all purchases 
for the AlHes; apptd. chmn. War Industries Bd., 
Mar. 5, 1918; resigned Jan. i, 1919; connected 
with Am. Commn. to Negotiate Peace as member 
of the drafting com. of the Economic Sect. ; mem. 
Supreme Economic Council and chmn. of its raw 
materials div. ; Am. del. on economics and repa- 
ration clauses; economic adviser for the Am. Peace 
Commn.; mem. President's Conf. for Capital 
and Labor, Oct. 1919 ..... 145 

ROOT, Elihu, 

Ex-Secretary of State; senator; b. Clinton, N. Y., 
Feb. 15, 1845; Educ. A.B., Hamilton Coll., 1864, 
A.M., 1867; taught at Rome Acad., 1865; LL.B., 
New York U., 1867; (LL.D., Hamilton, 1894, Yale, 
1900, Columbia, 1904, New York U., 1904, Wil- 
liams, 1905, Princeton, 1906, U. of Buenos Aires, 
1906, Harvard, 1907, Wesleyan, 1909, McHill, 
1913, Union U., 1914, U. of Stateof N. Y., 1915,1!. 
of Toronto, 1918, and Colgate U., 1919; Dr. Polit. 
Science, U. of Leyden, 1913; D.C.L., Oxford, 1913; 

vii 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

mem. Faculty of Political and Administrative 
Sciences, University of San Marcos, Lima, 1906); 
Admitted to bar, 1867; U. S. dist. atty. Southern 
Dist. of N. Y., 1883-5; Sec. of War in cabinet of 
President McKinley, Aug. i, 1899-Feb. i, 1904; 
Sec. of State in cabinet of President Roosevelt, 
July I, 1905-Jan. 27, 1909; U. S. senator from 
N. Y., 1909-15; mem. Alaskan Boundary Tri- 
bunal, 1903; counsel for U. S. in N. Atlantic Fish- 
eries Arbitration, 1910; mem. Permanent Court of 
Arbitration at The Hague, 19 10- ; pres. Carnegie 
Endowment for Internat. Peace, 1910; president 
Hague Tribunal of Arbitration between Great 
Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal, concerning 
church property, 1913; ambassador extraordinary 
at the head of special diplomatic mission to Russia, 
during revolution, 19 17. Awarded Nobel Peace 
Prize for 1912.. ...... 163 

JOHNSON, Hiram Warren, 

Senator; b. Sacramento, Cal., Sept. 2, 1866; Educ. 
U. of Cal., leaving in jr. yr. ; began as short-hand 
reporter; studied law in father's office; admitted 
to Cal. bar, 1888; mem. staff of pros, attys. in 
boodling cases, involving leading city officials and 
almost all pub. utility corpns. in San Francisco, 
1906-7; was selected to take the place of Francis 
J. Heney, after latter was shot down in court while 
prosecuting Abe Ruef, for bribery, 1908, and 
secured conviction of Ruef; gov. of Cal., 1911-15; 
reelected for term, 1915-19 (resigned Mar. 15, 
1917); a founder of Progressive Party, 1912, and 
nominee f or V. -P. of U. S. on Prog, ticket same yr. ; 
U. S. senator from Cal. for term 1917-23 . . 183 

viii 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

KNOX, Philander Chase, 

Ex-Secretary of State; b. Brownsville, Pa., May 6, 
1853; Educ. A.B., Mt. Union Coll., Ohio, 1872; 
read law in office of H. B. Swope, Pittsburgh; 
(LL.D., U. of Pa., 1905, Yale, 1907, Villanova, 
1909); Admitted to bar, 1875; asst. U. S. dist. 
atty., Western Dist. of Pa., 1876-7; Atty.-Gen. in 
cabinets of Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, 
Apr. 9, 1901-June 30, 1904; apptd. U. S. senator 
by Governor Pennypacker, June 10, 1904, for un- 
expired term of Matthew Stanley Quay, deceased; 
elected U. S. senator, Jan., 1905, for term, 1905-11 ; 
Sec. of State in cabinet of President Taft, Mar., 
1909-13; Reelected U. S. senator, for term 
1917-23 197 

LANSING, Robert, 

Ex-Secretary of State; b. at Watertown, N. Y., 
Oct. 17, 1864; Educ. A.B., Amherst, 1886; (LL.D., 
Amherst, 1915, Colgate, 1915, Princeton, 1917, 
Columbia, 1918, Union, 1918, U. State of N. Y., 
1919); Admitted to bar, 1889; Asso. counsel for 
U. S. in Behring Sea Arbitration, 1892-3; counsel 
for Behring Sea Claims Commn., 1896-7; solicitor 
and counsel for the United States under the Alas- 
kan Boundary Tribunal, 1903; counsel. North 
Atlantic Coast Fisheries Arbitration at The Hague, 
1909-10; agent of United States, Am, and British 
Claims Arbitration, 1912-14; counselor for Dept. 
of State, Mar. 20, 1914-June 23, 1915; Secretary 
of State in Cabinet of Pres. Wilson, June 23, 1915- 
Feb., 1920; mem. Am. Commn. to Negotiate 
Peace, Paris, 1918-19 ..... 213 

ix 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

PENROSE, Boies, 

Senator; b. Phila., Nov. i, i860; Educ. A.B., Har- 
vard, 1881; Admitted to the bar, 1883; mem. 
Pa. Ho. of Rep., 1884-6, Senate, 1887-97 (pres. 
protem., 1889, 1891); U. S. senator, 4 terms, 1897- 
1921; Chmn. Rep. State Com., 1903-5; mem. 
Rep. Nat. Com. since 1904 .... 229 

BORAH, WiUiam Edgar, 

Senator; b. at Fairfield, 111., June 29, 1865; Educ. 
Southern 111. Acad., Enfield, and U. of Kan.; 
Admitted to bar, 1889; U. S. senator from Idaho, 
Jan. 14, 1903; elected U. S. senator for terms 1907- 
13. 1913-19. 1919-25 ^245 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Warren Gamaliel Hardinc 
WooDROw Wilson 


I 






Front 


ispiece 

PAGE 
24 


George Harvey 










48 


Charles Evans Hughes 










66 


Edward Mandell House 










88 


Herbert Clark Hoover 










106 


Henry Cabot Lodge . 










128 


Bernard Mannes Baruch . 










144 


Elihu Root 










162 


Hiram Warren Johnson 










182 


Philander Chase Knox 










196 


Robert Lansing 










212 


Boies Penrose . 










228 


William Edgar Borah 










244 



Xl 



THE MIRRORS OF 
WASHINGTON 



WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING 

Every time we elect a new President we learn 
what a various creature is the Typical American. 

When Mr. Roosevelt was in the White House 
the Typical American was gay, robustious, full of 
the joy of living, an expansive spirit from the 
frontier, a picaresque twentieth century middle 
class Cavalier. He hit the line hard and did not 
flinch. And his laugh shook the skies. 

Came Wilson. And the Typical American was 
troubled about his soul. Rooted firmly in the 
church-going past, he carried the banner of the 
Lord, Democracy, idealistic, bent on perfecting 
that old incorrigible Man, he cuts off the right hand 
that offends him and votes for prohibition and 
woman suffrage, a Round Head in a Ford. 

Eight years and we have the perfectly typical 
American, Warren Gamaliel Harding of the modem 
type, the Square Head, typical of that America 
whose artistic taste is the movies, who reads and 

3 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

finds mental satisfaction in the vague inanities of 
the small town newspaper, who has faith in Amer- 
ica, who is for liberty, virtue, happiness, prosperity, 
law and order and all the standard generalities and 
holds them a perfect creed ; who distrusts anything 
new except mechanical inventions, the standard- 
ized product of the syndicate which supplies his 
nursing bottle, his school books, his information, 
his humor in a strip, his art on a screen, with a 
quantity production mind, cautious, uniformly 
hating divergence from uniformity, jailing it in 
troublous times, prosperous, who has his car and 
his bank account and can sell a bill of goods as well 
as the best of them. 

People who insist upon having their politics 
logical demand to know the why of Harding. Why 
was a man of so undistinguished a record as he 
first chosen as a candidate for President and then 
elected President? 

As a legislator he had left no mark on legislation. 
If he had retired from Congress at the end of his 
term his name would have existed only in the old 
Congressional directories, like that of a thousand 
others. As a public speaker he had said nothing 
that anybody could remember. He had passed 
through a Great War and left no mark on it. He 

4 



WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING 

had shared in a fierce debate upon the peace that 
followed the war but though you can recall small 
persons like McCumber and Kellogg and Moses 
and McCormick in that discussion you do not 
recall Harding. To be sure he made a speech in 
that debate which he himself says was a great 
speech but no newspaper thought fit to publish it 
because of its quality, or felt impelled to publish 
it in spite of its quality because it had been made 
by Harding. 

He neither compelled attention by what he said 
nor by his personality. Why, then, without fire- 
works, without distinction of any sort, without 
catching the public eye, or especially deserving to 
catch it, was Warren Harding elected Piesident of 
the United States? 

One plausible reason why he was nominated was 
that given by Senator Brandegee at Chicago, 
where he had a great deal to do with the nomina- 
tion. "There ain't any first laters this year. This 
ain't any 1880 or any 1904. We haven't any John 
Shermans or Theodore Roosevelts. We've got 
a lot of second raters and Warren Harding is the 
best of the second raters." 

Once nominated as a Republican his election of 
course inevitably followed. But to accept Mr. 

5 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

Brandegee's plea in avoidance is to agree to the 
eternal poverty of American political life, for most 
of our presidents have been precisely like Warren 
G. Harding, first-class second raters. 

Mrs. Harding, a woman of sound sense and 
much energy had an excellent instructive answer 
to the ' ' why . ' ' The pictures of the house in M ar ion , 
the celebrated front porch, herself and her husband 
were taken to be exhibited by cinema all over the 
land. She said, "I want the people to see these 
pictures so that they will know we are just folks 
like themselves." 

Warren Harding is "just folks." A witty 
woman said of him, alluding to the small town 
novel which was popular at the time of his inau- 
guration, "Main Street has arrived in the White 
House." 

The Average Man has risen up and by seven 
million majority elected an Average Man Piesi- 
dent. His defects were his virtues. He was chosen 
rather for what he wasn't than for what he was, — 
the inconspicuousness of his achievements. The 
"just folks " level of his mind, his small town man's 
caution, his sense of the security of the past, his 
average hopes and fears and practicality, his stand- 
ardized Americanism which would enable a people 

6 



WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING 

who wanted for a season to do so to take themselves 
poHtically for granted.^ 

The country was tired of the high thinking and 
rather plain spiritual living of Woodrow Wilson. 
It desired the man in the White House to cause it 
no more moral overstrain than does the man you 
meet in the Pullman smoking compartment or the 
man who writes the captions for the movies who 
employs a sort of Inaugural style, fieed from the 
inhibitions of statesmanship. It was in a mood 
similar to that of Mr. Harding himself when after 
his election he took Senators Freylinghuysen, Hale, 
and Elkins with him on his trip to Texas. Senator 
Knox observing his choice is reported to have said, 
' ' I think he is taking those three along because he 
wanted complete mental relaxation." All his life 
Mr. Harding has shown a predilection for com- 
panions who give him complete mental relaxation, 
though duty compels him to associate with the 
Hughes and the Hoovers. The conflict between 
duty and complete mental relaxation establishes a 
strong bond of sympathy between him and the 
average American. 

The ''why" of Harding is the democratic passion 
for equality. We are standardized, turned out like 
Fords by the htmdred million, and we cannot en- 

7 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

dure for long anyone who is not standardized. 
Such an one casts reflections upon us; why should 
we by our votes unnecessarily asperse ourselves? 
Occasionally we may indulge nationally, as men do 
individually, in the romantic belief that we are 
somebody else, that we are like Roosevelt or Wil- 
son — and they become typical of what we would be 
— but always we come back to the knowledge that 
we are nationally like Harding, who is typical of 
what we are. "Just folks" Kuppenheimered, 
movieized, associated piessed folks. 

Men debate whether or not Mr. Wilson was a 
great man and they will keep on doing so until the 
last of those passes away whose judgment of him 
is clouded by the sense of his personality. But 
men will never debate about the gieatness of Mr. 
Harding, not even Mr. Harding himself. He is 
modest. He has only two vanities, his vanity 
about his personal appearance and his vanity about 
his literary style. 

The inhibitions of a presidential candidate, 
bound to speak and say nothing, irked him. 

"Of course I could make better speeches than 
these" he told a friend during the campaign, "but 
I have to be so careful." 

In his inaugural address he let himself go, as 

8 



WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING 

much as it is possible for a man so cautious as he is 
to let himself go. It was a great speech, an in- 
augural to place alongside the inaugurals of Lin- 
coln and Washington, written in his most capable 
EngUsh, Harding at his best. It is hard for a man 
to move Marion for years with big editorials, to 
receive the daily compliments of Dick Cressinger 
and Jim Prendergast, without becoming vain of 
the power of his pen. It is his chief vanity and it is 
one that it is hard for him who speaks or writes 
to escape. He has none of that egotism which 
makes a self-confident man think himself the 
favorite of fortune. 

He said after his nomination at Chicago, "We 
drew to a pair of deuces and filled." He did not 
say it boastfully as a man who likes to draw to a 
pair of deuces and who always expects to fill. He 
said it with surprise and relief. He does not like 
to hold a pair of deuces and be forced to draw to 
them. He has not a large way of regarding losing 
and winning as all a part of the game. He hates to 
lose. He hated to lose even a friendly game of 
billiards in the Marion Club with his old friend 
Colonel Christian, father of his secretary, though 
the stake was only a cigar. 

When he was urged to seek the Republican 

9 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

nomination for the Presidency he is reported to 
have said, ' ' Why should I. My chances of winning 
are not good. If I let you use my name I shall 
probably in the end lose the nomination for the 
Senate. (His term was expiring.) If I don't run 
for the Presidency I can stay in the Senate all my 
life. I like the Senate. It is a very pleasant place. ' ' 

The Senate is like Marion, Ohio, a very pleasant 
place, for a certain temperament. And Mr. Hard- 
ing stayed in Marion all his life until force — a vis 
exterior; there is nothing inside Mr. Harding that 
urges him on and on — until force of circumstances, 
of politics, of other men's ambitions, took him out 
of Marion and set him down in Washington, in the 
Senate. 

The process of uprooting him from the pleasant 
place of Marion is reported to have been thus 
described by his political transplanter, the present 
Attorney General, Mr. Daugherty: "When it came 
to running for the Senate I found him, sunning 
himself in Florida, like a turtle on a log and I had to 
push him into the water and make him swim." 

And a similar thing happened when it came to 
running for the Presidency. It is a definite type 
of man who suns himself on a log, who is seduced 
by pleasant places like Marion, Ohio, whom the 

10 



WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING 

big town does not draw into its magnetic field, 
whose heart is not excited by the larger chances of 
life. Is he lazy? Is he lacking in imagination? 
Does he hate to lose? Does he want self-confi- 
dence? Is he over modest? Has he no love for 
life, life as a great adventure? Whatever he is, 
Mr. Harding is that kind of man, that kind of man 
to start out with. 

But this is only the point of departure, that 
choice to remain in a pleasant place like Marion, 
not to risk what you have, your sure place in 
society as the son of one of the better famiUes, the 
reasonable prospect that the growth of your small 
town will bring some accretion to your own for- 
tunes, the decision not to hazard greatly in New 
York or Chicago or on the frontier. Life asks Httle 
of you in those pleasant places like Marion and in 
return for that little gives generously, especially 
if you are, to begin with, well placed, if you are 
ingratiatingly handsome, if your personahty is 
agreeable— " The best fellow in the world to play 
poker with all Saturday night," as a Marionite 
feelingly described the President to me, and if you 
have a gift of words as handsome and abundant as 
your looks. 

Mr. Harding is a handsome man, endowed with 

II 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

the gifts that reinforce the charm of his exterior, a 
fine voice, a winning smile, a fluency of which his 
inaugural is the best instance; an ample man, you 
might say. But he is too handsome, too endowed, 
for his own good, his own spiritual good. The 
shght stoop of his shoulders, the soft figure, the 
heaviness under the eyes betray in some measui^e 
perhaps the consequences of nature's excessive 
generosity. Given all these things you take, it 
may be, too much for granted. There is not much 
to stiffen the mental, moral, and physical fibers. 

Given such good looks, such favor from nature, 
and an environment in which the struggle is not 
sharp and existence is a species of mildly purpose- 
ful flanerie. You lounge a bit stoop- shoulderedly 
forward to success. There is nothing hard about 
the President. I once described him in somewhat 
this fashion to a banker in New York who was in- 
terested in knowing what kind of a President we 
had. 

"You agree," he said, "with a friend of Hard- 
ing's who came in to see me a few days ago. This 
friend said to me ' Warren is the best fellow in the 
world. He has wonderful tact. He knows how to 
make men work with him and how to get the best 
out of them. He is politically adroit. He is con- 

12 



WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING 

scientious. He has a keen sense of his responsibili- 
ties. He has unusual common sense.' And he 
named other similar virtues, 'Well,' I asked him, 
'What is his defect?' 'Oh,' he replied, 'the only 
trouble with Warren is that he lacks mentality.'" 

The story, like most stories, exaggerates. The 
President has the average man's virtues of common 
sense and conscientiousness with rather more than 
the average man's political skill and the average 
man's industry or lack of industry. His mentality 
is not lacking; it is undisciplined, especially in its 
higher ranges, by hard effort. There is a certain 
softness about him mentally. It is not an accident 
that his favorite companions are the least intellec- 
tual members of that house of average intelligence, 
the Senate. They remind him of the mental sur- 
roundings of Marion, the pleasant but unstimulat- 
ing mental atmosphere of the Marion Club, with its 
successful small town business men, its local store- 
keepers, its banker whose mental horizon is bound- 
ed by Marion County, the value of whose farm 
lands for mortgages he knows to a penny, the 
lumber dealer whose eye rests on the forests of 
Kentucky and West Virginia. 

The President has never felt the sharpening of 
competition. He was a local pundit because he 

13 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

was the editor. He was the editor because he 
owned the RepubHcan paper of Marion. There 
was no effective rival. No strong intelligence 
challenged his and made him fight for his place. 
He never studied hard or thought deeply on public 
questions. A man who stays where he is put by 
birth tends to accept authority, and authority is 
strong in small places. The acceptance of author- 
ity implies few risks. It is like staying in Marion 
instead of going to New York or even Cleveland. 
It is easier, and often more profitable than studying 
hard or thinking deeply or inquiring too much. 

And Mr. Harding's is a mind that bows to 
authority. What his party says is enough for Mr. 
Harding. His party is for protection and Mr. 
Harding is for protection; the arguments for pro- 
tection may be readily assimilated from the edi- 
torials of one good big city newspaper and from a 
few campaign addresses. His party is for the re- 
mission of tolls on American shipping in the 
Panama Canal and Mr. Harding is for the remission 
of tolls. Mr. Root broke with his party on tolls 
and Mr. Harding is as much shocked at Mr. Root's 
deviation as the matrons of Marion would be over 
the public disregard of the Seventh Commandment 
by one of their number. His party became some- 

14 



WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING 

how for the payment of Colombia's Panama claims 
and Mr. Harding was for their payment. 

A story tells just how Senator Kellogg went to 
the President to oppose the Colombia treaty. After 
hearing Mr. Kellogg Mr. Harding remarked, "Well, 
Frank, you have something on me. You've evi- 
dently read the treaty. I haven't." 

A mind accepting authority favors certain gen- 
eral policies. It is not sufficiently inquiring to 
trouble itself with the details. Mr. Harding is for 
all sorts of things but is content to be merely for 
them. A curious illustration developed in Marion, 
during the visits of the best minds. He said to the 
newspaper men there one day, "I am for voluntary 
military training." 

"What would you train, Mr. President," asked 
one of the journalists, "officers or men?" 

The President hesitated. At last he said, "I 
haven't thought of that." 

"But," said one of his interlocutors, "the 
colleges are training a lot of officers now." 

This brought no response. 

Another who had experience in the Great War 
remarked, "In the last war we were lacking in 
trained non-coms ; it would be a good idea to train 
a lot of them." 

15 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

"Yes," rejoined Mr. Harding eagerly, "That 
would be a good idea." 

A more inquiring mind would have gone further 
than to be "for voluntary military training." A 
quicker, less cautious, if no more thorough mind 
would have answered the first question, "What 
would you train, officers or men?" by answering 
instantly "Both." 

In that colloquy you have revealed all the men- 
tal habits of Mr. Harding. He was asked once, 
after he had had several conferences with Senator 
McCumber, Senator Smoot, Representative Ford- 
ney, and others who would be responsible for finan- 
cial legislation, ' ' Have you worked out the larger 
details of your taxation policy?" 

"Naturally not!" was his reply. That "nat- 
urally" sprang I suppose from his habit of believing 
that somewhere there is authority. Somewhere 
there would be authority to determine what the 
larger details of the party's financial policy should 
be. 

Now, this authority is not going to be any one 
man or any two men. The President, his friends 
tell us, is jealous of any assumption of power by 
any of his advisers. He is unwilling to have the 
public think that any other than himself is Presi- 

i6 



WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING 

dent. A man as handsome as Harding, as vain of 
his literary style as he is, has an ego that is not 
capable of total self-effacement. He will bow to 
impersonal authority like that of the party, or 
invoke the anon3nTious govei nance of ' ' best minds, ' ' 
calling rather often on God as a well established 
authority, but he will not let authority be personal 
and be called Daugheity, or Lodge or Knox or 
whomever you will. 

The President's attitude is rather like that of the 
average man during the campaign. If you said to a 
voter on a Pullman, "Mr. Harding is a man of 
small public experience, not known by any large 
political accomphshment, " he would always an- 
swer optimistically, "Well, they will see to it that 
he makes good . " Asked who " They ' ' were he was 
always vague and elusive, gods on the mountain 
perhaps. There is an American religion, the aver- 
age man's faith: it is "Them." "They" are the 
fountain of authority. 

As Mr. Harding knew little competition in 
Marion so he has known Httle competition in public 
life which in this country is not genuinely com- 
petitive. Mr. Lloyd George is at the head of the 
British government because he is the greatest 
master of the House of Commons in a generation 

2 17 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

and he is chosen by the men who know him for 
what he is, his fellow members of the House of 
Commons. An American President is selected by 
the newspapers, which know little about him, by 
the politicians, who do not want a master but a 
slave, by the delegates to a national convention, 
tired, with hotel bills mounting, ready to name 
anybody in order to go home. The presidency, 
the one great prize in American public life, is at- 
tained by no known rules and under conditions 
which have nothing in them to make a man work 
hard or think hard, especially one endowed with a 
handsome face and figure, an ingratiating person- 
ality, and a literary style. 

The small town man, unimaginative and of 
restricted mental horizon does not think in terms of 
masses of mankind. Masses vaguely appall him. 
They exist in the big cities on which he turned his 
back in his unaudacious youth. His contacts are 
with individuals. His democracy consists in smil- 
ing upon the village painter and calling him 
"Harry, " in always nodding to the village cobbler 
and calling him "Bill," in stopping on the street 
comer with a group, which has not been invited to 
join the village club, putting his hand on the shoul- 
der of one of them and calling them "Fellows." 

i8 



WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING 

Politics in the small town is limited to dealing with 
persons, to enlisting the support of men with a 
following at the polls. 

Mr. Harding once drew this picture of his idea of 
politics. " If I had a policy to put over I should go 
about it this way," he said. "You all know the 
town meeting, if not by experience, by hearsay. 
Now if I had a program that I wanted to have 
adopted by a town meeting I should go to the three 
or four most influential men in my community. 
I should talk it out with them. I should make 
concessions to them until I had got them to agree 
with me. And then I should go into the town 
meeting feeling perfectly confident that my plan 
would go through. Well it's the same in the nation 
as in the town meeting, or in the whole world, if 
you will. I should always go first to the three or 
four leading men." 

Mr. Harding thinks of politics in this personal 
way. He does not conceive of it as the force of 
ideas or the weight of morality moving the hearts 
of mankind. Mankind is only a word to him, one 
that he often uses, — or perhaps he prefers human- 
ity, which has two more syllables — a large loose 
word that he employs to make his thought look 
bigger than it really is, something like the stage 

19 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

device for making an ordinary man seem ten feet 
tall. 

Thus he will never try to move the mass of the 
people as his predecessors have. He will not "go 
to the country." He will not bring public opinion 
to bear as a disciplinary force in his household. 
He will treat the whole United States as if it were 
a Marion, constilting endless "best minds," com- 
posing differences, seeking unity, with the aid of his 
exceptional tact. 

This attitude has its disadvantages. If you have 
a passion for ideas and an indifference for persons 
you can say ' ' yes " or " no " easily ; you may end by 
being dictatorial and arrogant, as Mr. Wilson was; 
but you will not be weak. If, on the contrary, you 
are indifferent to ideas and considerate of persons 
you find it hard to say " Decided" to any question. 
And somewhere there must be authority, the pass- 
ing of the final judgment and the giving of orders. 

But he compensates for his own defects. Almost 
as good as greatness is a knowledge of yoiu* own 
limitations ; and Mr. Harding knows his thoroughly. 
Out of his modesty, his desire to reinforce himself, 
has proceeded the strongest cabinet that Washing- 
ton has seen in a generation. He likes to have 
decisions rest upon the broad base of more than one 

20 



WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING 

intelligence and he has surrounded himself for this 
purpose with able associates. His policies will lack 
imagination, which is not a composite product, but 
they will have practicality, which is the greatest 
common denomination of several minds; and he, 
moreover, is himself unimaginative and practical. 

Whatever superstructure of world organization 
he takes part in, behind it will be the reality, a 
private understanding with the biggest man in 
sight; for this reason the fall of Lloyd George and 
the succession of a Labor government in England 
will disconcert him terribly. The democratic 
passion for equality, which dogs the tracks of the 
great, he mollifies by reminding the nation always 
that he is "just folks," by opening the White 
House lawn gates, by calling everyone by his first 
name. So constant is his aim to appease it that 
I wonder if he is not sometimes betrayed into 
addressing his Secretary of State as "Charley." 



21 




U. and U. 



WOODROW WILSON 



WOODROW WILSON 

The explanation of President Wilson will be 
found in a certain inferiority. When all his per- 
sonal history becomes known, when his papers and 
letters have all been published and read, when the 
memoirs of others have told all that there is to be 
told, there will stand clear something inadequate, 
a lack of robustness, mental or nervous, an exces- 
sive sensitiveness, over self -consciousness, shrink- 
ing from life, a neurotic something that in the end 
brought on defeat and the final overthrow. He 
was never quite a normal man with the average 
man's capacity to endure and enjoy but a strange, 
impeded, self-absorbed personality. 

History arranged the greatest stage of all time, 
and on it placed a lot of little figures, "pigmy 
minds" — all save one, and he the nearest great, 
an imworldly person stimmoned from a cloister, 
with the vision of genius and the practical in- 
capacity of one who has run away from life, hating 

25 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

men but loving all mankind, eloquent but inarticu- 
late in a large way, incapable of true self expression 
in his chosen field of political action, so self -cen- 
tered that he forgot the world's tragedy and 
merged it into his own, making great things little 
and httle things great, one of "life's ironies," the 
everlasting refutation of the optimistic notion that 
when there is a crisis fate produces a man big 
enough to meet it. 

The world finds it hard to speak of Mr. Wilson 
except in superlatives. A British journalist called 
him the other day, "the wickedest man in the 
world. ' ' This was something new in extravagance. 
I asked, "Why the wickedest?" He said, "Be- 
cause he was so unable to forget himself that he 
brought the peace of the world down in a common 
smash with his own personal fortunes." 

On the other hand General Jan Christian Smuts, 
writing with that perspective which distance gives, 
pronounces it to be not Wilson's fault but the 
fault of humanity that the vision of universal peace 
failed. Civilization was not advanced enough to 
make peace without vindictiveness possible. 

This debate goes on and on. Mr. Wilson is 
either the worst hated or the most regretted per- 
sonality of the Great War. The place of no one 

26 



WOODROW WILSON 

else is worth disputing. Lloyd George is the con- 
summate politician, limited by the meanness of 
his art. Clemenceau is the personification of 
nationality, limited by the narrowness of his view. 
Mr. Wilson alone had his hour of superlative 
greatness when the whole earth listened to him and 
followed him; an hour which ended with him only 
dimly aware of his vision and furiously conscious 
of pin pricks. 

You observe this inadequacy in Mr. Wilson, this 
incapacity to endure, at the outset of his career. 
It is characteristic of certain temperaments that 
when they first face life they should run away from 
it as Mr. Wilson did when, having studied law and 
having been admitted to the bar, he abandoned 
practice and went to teach in a girls' school. That 
was the early sign in him of that sense of unfitness 
for the more arduous contacts of life which was so 
conspicuous a trait during his presidency. He 
could not endure meeting men on an equal footing, 
where there was a conflict of wills, a rough clash 
of minds, where no concession was made to sensi- 
tiveness and egotism. 

Some nervous insufficiency causes this shrinking, 
like the quick retreat from cold water of an in- 
adequate body. Commonly a man who runs away 

27 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

from life after the first contact with it hates himself 
for his flight and there begins a conflict inside him 
which ends either in his admission of defeat and 
acknowledgment of his unfitness or in his convinc- 
ing himself that his real motive was contempt of 
that on which he turned his back. If he admits to 
himself that he is really a little less courageous, a 
little more sensitive, a little less at home in this 
world, then he is gone. If he does satisfy himself 
that he is superior, has higher ideals, worthier 
ends, despises the ordinary arts of success he 
becomes arrogant, merely in self defense. 

Mr. Wilson's "intellectual snobbism" was this 
kind of arrogance, acquired for moral self preserva- 
tion, like that of the small boy who when his com- 
panions refuse to play with him says to himself 
that he is smarter than they are, gets higher marks 
in school, that he has a better gun than they have 
or that he, when he grows up, will be a great general 
while they are nobody. Almost everyone who 
feels himself unequal in some direction can satisfy 
himself that he exceeds in others. It is a common 
and human sort of arrogance, and Mr. Wilson had 
it inordinately. 

He hated and contemned the law, in which life 
had given him his first glimpse of his frailty. He 

28 



WOODROW WILSON 

would have no lawyers make the peace or draft the 
covenant of the league of nations. Lawyers 
were pitiful creatures, — he kept one of them near 
him, Mr. Lansing, admirably chosen, to remind 
him of how contemptible they were, living in fear 
of precedents, writing a barbarous jargon out of 
deeds and covenants, impeding the freedom of the 
imagination with their endless citations. 

He despised politicians, he despised business 
men, he despised the whole range of men who 
ptirsue worldly arts with success. He despised 
the qualities which he had not himself, but like 
all men who are arrogant self protectively he was 
driven to introspection and analyzed himself 
pitilessly. 

The public got glimpses of these analyses. 
Sometimes he called that something in him which 
left him less fit for the world than the average, a 
little regretfully, "his singletrack mind." Some- 
times it leaped to light as an object of pride, his 
arrogance again, a pride that was "too great to 
fight," like the common run of men, — in the law 
courts or on the battlefields. He kept asking him- 
self the question, "Why am I not as other men 
are?", and sometimes his nature would rise up in 
protest and he would exclaim that he was as other 

29 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

men were and would pathetically tell the world 
that he was "misunderstood," that he was not 
cold and reserved but warm and genial and kindly, 
only largely because the world would see him as he 
was. 

But always the one safe recourse, the one assur- 
ance of personal stability was arrogance. Con- 
tempt was the most characteristic habit of his 
mind. Out of office he is no sage looking charitably 
at the fumbling of his successor. 

A friend who has seen him since his retirement 
describes him as watching "with supreme con- 
tempt" the executive efforts of Mr. Harding. 
Washington gossip credits him with inventing the 
phrase, "the bungalow mind," to describe the 
present occupant of the White House. Another 
remark of his about the new President is said to 
have been "I look forward to the new administra- 
tion with no unpleasant anticipations, except those 
caused by Mr. Harding's literary style." 

There is always his contrast of others with him- 
self to their disadvantage, mentally or morally, as 
writers, or leaders, or statesmen. So full a life as 
Mr. Wilson led in the last dozen or more years 
ought to have made him less self-conscious. A 
robuster person would have hated with a certain 

30 



WOODROW WILSON 

zest, continued with a certain gaiety, laughed as he 
fought, found something to respect in his foes, 
seen the curtain fall upon his own activities with a 
certain cheerfulness. 

He seems deficient in resources. He had not 
that gusto which richly endowed natures ordinarily 
have. He found no fun in measuring his strength 
with other men's. There was a certain overstrain 
about him, which made him cushion himself about 
with non-resistant personalities. He lacked curi- 
osity. His fine mind seemed to want the energy 
to interest itself in the details of any subject that 
filled it, and this was one of his fatal weaknesses at 
the Peace Conference. Perhaps it was a defi- 
ciency of vital force. Moreover he came to his 
great task tired. His life till he was past fifty was 
one of defeat. There was the early disappoint- 
ment and turning back from law practice, the giv- 
ing up of his youthful ambition for a public career 
to which he had trained himself passionately by 
the study of public speaking. Dr. Albert Shaw, 
who was his fellow student at Johns Hopkins, says 
that in the University Mr. Wilson was the finest 
speaker, except possibly the old President of the 
College, Dr. Daniel Cort Oilman. 

Then there were the long years of poverty as a 

31 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

college professor, when he overworked at writing 
and university extension lectures, to make his 
small salary as a teacher equal to the support of 
his family, his three children and his aged parents. 
There was his failure at literature, for his History 
of the United States brought him neither fame nor 
money, the public finding it dull and unreadable. 

Then the crowning unsuccess as President of 
Princeton; for when his luck changed and a poli- 
tical career opened to him as Governor of New 
Jersey, with trustees and alumni against him, 
nothing seemed to be before him but resignation 
and a small professorship in a Southern College. It 
was a straightened life that he had led when he 
came to Washington for the first time as President, 
scandalizing the servants of the White House with 
the scantness of his personal effects. There had 
been neither the time nor the means nor probably 
the energy for larger human contacts. And some- 
thing inherent always held him back from the 
world, something which diverted him to academic 
life, which when he was writing his Congressio?zal 
Government, his best book, held him in Baltimore, 
almost a suburb of Washington, where he read 
what he wrote to his fellow-students at Johns Hop- 
kins, whose livelier curiosity took them often to the 

32 



WOODROW WILSON 

galleries of the House and the Senate about which 
he was writing from a distance. 

Those to whom life is kinder than it was during 
many years to Mr. Wilson have naturally a zest 
for it. Robust er natures than his even though 
life averts her face, often preserve a zest for it. 
Conscious of his powers he seems to have fortified 
himself against failure with scorn. He had a scorn 
for the intellects of those who succeed by arts which 
he did not possess. He had scorn for politicians. 
He had a scorn for wealth. He had a scorn for his 
enemies. He had a scorn for Republicans. He 
had a scorn for the men with whom he had to deal 
in Europe, the heads of the Allied Governments. 

Above all he scorned Lloyd George, an instinct 
telling him that the British Premier had a thou- 
sand arts where he himself, unschooled in confer- 
ence with equals, had none. He said of Lloyd 
George just before he sailed for Paris, suspecting 
him of treachery to the League of Nations, "I shall 
look him in the eye and say to him Damn you, if 
you do not accept the League I shall go to the 
people of Great Britain and say things to them that 
will shake your government." 

When he made this threat he could not foresee 
that the compromise of the Peace would leave him 
3 33 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

with so little character that British Liberals, their 
faith destroyed, should in the end couple his name 
with their own Premier's and exclaim, "Your man 
Wilson talks like Jesus Christ, but he acts like 
Lloyd George ! ' ' 

More than all others he scorned Lodge. The 
Massachusetts Senator who had put by scholar- 
ship for politics and had won the opportunity to do 
menial service for a political machine hated the 
man who had chosen scholarship, for whatever 
motive, and come out with the Presidency. You 
hate the man you might perhaps have been if you 
had chosen more boldly, more according to your 
heart — if you are like Mr. Lodge. 

A life of demeaning himself to politicians, of 
waiting for dead men's shoes in the Senate, had, 
however, brought some compensations to Lodge, 
among others an inordinate capacity to hurt. The 
Massachusetts Senator could get under the Presi- 
dent's skin as no other man could. Washington is 
a place where every whisper is heard in the White 
House. 

Mr. Lodge's favorite private charge uttered in a 
tone of withering scorn was that the President 
failed to respond as a man would to the national 
insult offered by Germany in sinking the Lusitania 

34 



WOODROW WILSON 

because there was something womanish about him 
and he would tell, to prove it, how Wilson went 
white and almost collapsed over the news that 
blood had been shed through the landing of 
American marines at Vera Cruz. 

The President hardly failed to hear this. Per- 
haps it reminded him of that something in him 
which he was always trying to forget, that some- 
thing which diverted his life toward failure at the 
outset, which once betrayed him, with a strange 
mixture of the arrogance and inferiority, into his 
famous words "too proud to fight." 

At any rate mutual comprehension and hatred 
between these two men was instinctive, each hav- 
ing the opposite choice in the beginning and neither 
in his heart perhaps ever having forgiven himself 
wholly for his choice. Mr. Wilson could never get 
Mr. Lodge wholly out of his mind in the last two 
years of his Presidency, a disability which pre- 
vented him from looking quite calmly and sanely 
at public questions. 

The story of the President's appeal for a Demo- 
cratic Congress in 191 8 which has never been fully 
told, illustrates the bearing this Lodge obsession 
had upon Mr. Wilson's later fate. When the Con- 
gressional election was approaching ex-Congress- 

35 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

man Scott Ferris, then acting as Chairman of the 
Democratic National Committee, went to the 
President and told him that there was danger of 
losing both houses of Congress, the lower house not 
being important, but the Senate as a factor in 
foreign relations, Mr. Ferris suggested, was indis- 
pensable to the Democratic party. Mr. Wilson 
was more hopeful but agreed to take under advise- 
ment some sort of appeal to the country. It was 
not desired that this should be an3rthing more than 
a letter, perhaps to Mr. Ferris, intended for pub- 
lication, and pointing out the need of support for 
the President's policies in the next Congress. 

Shortly afterward Mr. Tumulty, the President's 
Secretary, brought to the Shoreham Hotel in Wash- 
ington an appeal to the country for a Democratic 
Congress and read it to several Democrats gathered 
there for the purpose, including Homer S. Cum- 
mings, who, by that time, had become acting 
Chairman of the Democratic National Committee 
and was in charge of the campaign. Mr. Cum- 
mings doubted the wisdom of an appeal, couched 
in such terms as the one Mr. Tumulty read. He 
took it to Vance McCormick, Chairman of the 
Democratic National Committee, who, because he 
was Chairman of the War Trade Board, was not 

36 



WOODROW WILSON 

taking part in the election . Mr. McConnick agreed 
with Mr. Cummings that the appeal as written 
would do more harm than good to the Democratic 
party, saying that the war had not been conducted 
on a partisan basis, that some of his own associates 
on the War Trade Board were Republicans and 
that Mr. Wilson should ask for the reelection of all 
who had been loyal supporters of the war, whether 
Republicans or Democrats. 

The appeal to the country as it then stood con- 
tained a bitter denunciation of Senator Lodge. 
What Wilson chiefly saw in a Republican victory 
was himself at the mercy of the man he hated worst, 
the Massachusetts Senator. Mr. McCormick 
thought that if the President was going to name 
names he must, at least, denounce Claude Kitchen, 
the Democratic leader of the House, as well as 
Senator Lodge. If Mr. Wilson would ask for the 
reelection of those who had been loyal, of what- 
ever party, listing the offenders, of both parties, 
including Mr. Lodge if he must, Mr. McCormick 
believed that the impression on the country would 
be favorable and thus a Democratic Congress 
might be elected. 

Being agreed, Mr. Cimmiings and Mr. McCor- 
mick went to the White House and argued for a 

37 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

less partisan appeal. All they accomplished was 
the striking of Mr. Lodge's name out of the appeal 
by convincing Mr. Wilson that he could not at- 
tack the Republican Senator while ignoring the 
worse offenses of Mr. Kitchen and Champ Clark 
in his own party. 

For the rest, the President made the appeal 
more purely personal and more partisan than 
before. He could not get the Lodge obsession out 
of his mind. He could not bring himself to ask 
for the election of members of Mr. Lodge's party. 
The wisdom of Mr. Cummings and Mr. McCor- 
mick was soon vindicated. The appeal with 
Mr. Lodge's name out was only a shade less 
impolitic than it would have been with his name 
in. It gave Mr. Lodge his majority in the Senate 
and turned the peace into a personal issue between 
the two "scholars in politics." 

By this time Mr. Wilson had lost his sense of 
actuality. He could ask the nation for a Congress 
to his liking as a personal due. He could condemn 
Mr. Lodge as an enemy of those purposes with 
which we entered the war, simply because Mr. 
Lodge could hurt him as no other man could. The 
President had been talking for some months to the 
whole world and the whole world had listened with 

38 



WOODROW WILSON 

profound attention. His mission had taken, un- 
consciously perhaps, a Messianic character. His 
enemies were the enemies of God. The ordinary 
metes and bounds of personaUty had broken down. 
The state of mind revealed in the appeal as origin- 
ally written was the state of mind of the Peace 
Conference and of the fight over the Treaty and 
the League which succeeded the Peace Conference. 
All that happened afterwards, including the pitiful 
personal tragedy, had become inevitable. 

For a while at Paris amid the triumphs of his 
European reception and the successes of the first 
few months up to the adoption of the League 
covenant Mr. Wilson forgot Mr. Lodge, forgot him 
too completely. 

It was my fortune to see him at the apex of his 
career. He was about to sail for America on that 
visit which he made here in the midst of the treaty 
making. His League covenant had just been 
agreed to. The world had accepted him. Fate 
had led him far from those paths of defeat and ob- 
scurity into which his sensitiveness and shyness 
had turned him as a youth. He was elated and 
confident. He looked marvelously fresh and young, 
his color warm and youthful, his eye alive with 
pleasure. 

39 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

He talked long and well, answered questions 
freely, told stories of his associates at the peace 
table, especially of one who never read the memo- 
randa his secretaries prepared, who was so deaf 
that he could not hear a word spoken in conference 
and who spoke so loudly that no one could inter- 
rupt him. "What could one do," Mr. Wilson 
asked, "to penetrate a mind like that?" M. 
Clemenceau, who unlike this other commissioner, 
had eyes and saw not, had ears and neither would 
he hear, had said to him once, in response to a fiiTQ 
negative, "You have a heart of steel!" "I felt 
like replying to him," flashed Mr. Wilson, " I have 
not the heart to steal!" 

So well poised, so sure of himself he felt that he 
could do an extraordinary thing. He could laugh 
off a mistake. Robuster natures accept mistakes 
as a child accepts timibles. Mistakes for Mr. 
Wilson were ordinarily crises for his arrogancy. 

You may judge, then, how confident he was at 
that supreme moment. He could brush aside a 
great mistake lightly. Someone asked him, * * What 
about the freedom of the seas?" 

"The freedom of the seas!" he answered, "I 
must tell you about that. It's a great joke on me. 
I left America thinking the freedom of the seas 

40 



WOODROW WILSON 

the most important issue of the Peace Conference. 
When I got here I found there was no such issue. 
You see the freedom of the seas concerns neutrals 
in time of war. But when we have the League of 
Nations there will be no neutrals in time of war. 
So, of cotu-se, there will be no question of the free- 
dom of the seas. I hadn't thought the thing out 
clearly." 

From that moment the decline began. Mr. 
Wilson had unwisely chosen to have his victory 
first and his defeats afterward, always bad general- 
ship. 

Compromise followed compromise, each one 
destructive. The foiu"teen points were impaired 
imtil Mr. Wilson hated to be reminded of them by 
Lloyd George, in the case of Dantzig and the 
Polish corridor. The dawn of a better world grew 
dubious. The ardor of mankind cooled. They 
were at first incredulous, then skeptical. 

The President saw only slowly the consequences 
of that chaffering to which Mr. Lloyd George and 
M. Clemenceau led him. He was a poor merchant. 
He dealt in morals and could cast up no daily bal- 
ance. He was busy with details for which his 
mind had no sufficient curiosity or energy. Mr. 
Keynes, in his remarkable description of Mr. 

41 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

Wilson making peace, says that his mind was slow. 

Doubtless it was slow in political trading about 
the council table, just as a philosopher may be slow 
in the small talk of a five o'clock tea. 

Mr. Wilson was out of his element in the con- 
ference; Mr. Lloyd George and M. Clemenceau 
were in theirs. Gradually the conviction entered 
Mr. Wilson's soul that what was being destroyed 
at Paris was Mr. Wilson. The figure of Senator 
Lodge began to rise across the Atlantic, malevo- 
lent and evil, the Lodge against whom he had 
wanted to appeal to the American people. 

The strain was telling upon him. He had to sit 
beside his destroyers with that smiling amiability 
which Mr. Lansing records in his book. He had 
to deal with men on a basis of equality, a thing 
which he had run away from doing in his youth, 
which all his life had made too great demands 
upon his sensitive, arrogant nature. 

One whose duty it was to see him every night 
after the meetings of the Big Three reports that he 
found him with the left side of his face twitching. 
To collect his memory he would pass his hand 
several times wearily over his brow. The ardu- 
ousness of the labor was not great enough to 
account for this. M. Clemenceau at nearly eighty 

42 



WOODROW WILSON 

stood the strain and an assassin's bullet as well. 
Mr. Lloyd George thrived on what he did. But 
the issue was not personal with them. Neither 
was assisting, with difficult amiability, at his own 
destruction. The time came when he might have 
had back some of the ground he had given. Mr. 
Lloyd George offered it to him. He would not 
have it. What it was proposed to amend was not 
so much the peace treaty as Mr. Wilson himself, 
and he could not admit that he needed amendment. 

The issue had become personal and Mr. Lodge, 
upon Mr. Wilson's return, with malevolent under- 
standing, kept it personal. The Republicans made 
their fight in the one way that made yielding by 
the President impossible. They made it nominally 
on the League but really on Mr. Wilson. The 
President might have compromised on the League, 
but he could not compromise on Mr. Wilson. Of 
such involvement in self there could be only one 
end. 

Like a poet of one poem, Mr. Wilson is a states- 
man of one vision, an inspiring vision, but one 
which his own weakness kept him from realizing. 
His domestic achievements are not remarkable, 
his administration being one in which movements 
came to a head rather than one in which much was 

43 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

initiated. He might have cut the war short by 
two years and saved the world much havoc, if he 
had begun to fight when the Lusitania was sunk. 
Once in the war he saw his country small and him- 
self large; he did not conceive of the nation as 
winning the war by sending millions of men to 
France ; he saw himself as winning the war by talk- 
ing across the Atlantic. At the Peace Conference 
he did not conceive of his country's winning the 
peace by the powerful position in which victory 
had left it ; he saw himself as winning the peace by 
the hold he personally had upon the peoples of 
Europe. Like Napoleon, of whom Marshal Foch 
wrote recently, "II oublia qu'un homme ne peut 
etre Dieu; qu'au-dessus de V individu, il y a la 
nation," he forgot that man can not be God; 
that over and above the individual there is the 
nation. 

In politics he knew at first better than any other, 
again to quote Foch, that "above men is morality." 
This knowledge brought him many victories. But 
at critical junctures, as in his 191 8 appeal to the 
voters and in the treaty fight, he forgot that 
morality was above one man, himself. He ex- 
celled in appeals to the heart and conscience of the 
nation, a gift Mr. Harding has not; the lesser arts 

44 



WOODROW WILSON 

of the politician, tact and skill in the handling and 
selecting of men, were lacking. 

He forgot in his greatness and aloofness the 
national passion for equality; which a more bril- 
liant politician, Mr. Roosevelt, appeased by acting 
as the people's court jester, and which a shrewder 
politician, Mr. Harding, guards against by re- 
minding the country that he is "just folks"; and 
in the end the masses turned upon him, like a 
Roman mob on a defeated gladiator. 



45 




^ 




U. and U. 



GEORGE HARVEY 



GEORGE HARVEY 

There is something inscrutably ludicrous in the 
anxiety, bordering upon consternation, that lurks 
in the elongated and gi'otesque shadow that George 
Harvey casts upon Washington. The Republican 
fathers, who now feel a sense of responsibility, after 
a lapse of many years, for the future of party and 
country, do not yet know how to take him. 

As a campaign asset his value could be expressed 
in intelligible terms. But as a party liability, or 
asset, — ^many a good Republican wishes he knew 
which, — he remains an enigma. There is not one 
of the array of elders of either political persuasion 
who, while laughing at his satirical sword-play, 
does not watch him covertly out of the corner of 
the eye, trembling at the potential ruin they 
consider him capable of accomplishing. 

With all his weaknesses, — principally an almost 
hilarious political irregularity, — but two Republi- 
can hands were raised against him in the Senate 

49 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

when he was nominated for the Coirrt of Saint 
James. When he rather imbecomingly filliped 
John Bull on the nose in his maiden speech as the 
premier ambassador, incidentally ridiculing some 
of his own countiymen's war ideals, President Hard- 
ing and Secretary Hughes, gravely and with rather 
obvious emphasis, tried to set the matter aright as 
best they could. But there was no hint of repri- 
mand; only a fervent hope that the mercurial 
Harvey would remain quiescent until the memory 
of the episode passed. 

The quondam editor, now the representative of 
his country on the Supreme Council, in which 
capacity he is even more important than as Am- 
bassador, represents a new strain in American 
politics. His mental habits bewilder the President, 
shock the proper and somewhat conventional 
Secretary of State, and throw such repositories of 
national divinity as Senators Lodge and Knox 
into utter confusion. 

Harvey plays the game of politics according to 
his own rules, the underlying principle of which is 
audacity. He knows very well that the weak spot 
in the armor of nearly all politicians of the old 
school is their assumption of superiority, a sort of 
mask of benignant political venerability. They 

50 



I 



GEORGE HARVEY 

dread satire. They shrink from ridicule. A well- 
directed critical outburst freezes them. Such has 
been the Harvey method of approach. Having 
reduced his subjects to a state of terror, he flatters 
them, cajoles them, and finally makes terms with 
them; but he always remains a more or less un- 
stable and imcertain quantity, potentially ex- 
plosive. 

There is not much of the present Harvey to be 
gleaned from his earlier experiences, except the 
pertinacity that has had much to do with his ir- 
regular climb up the ladder. He was born in 
Peacham, Vermont, where as a boy after school 
hours he mounted a stool in his father's general 
store and kept books. At the end of the year his 
accoimts were short a penny. Because of this he 
received no Christmas gift not, as he has said, 
because his father begrudged the copper more than 
any other Vermont storekeeper, but because he was 
meticulously careful himself and expected the 
yoimger generation to be likewise. 

This experience must have been etched upon 
Harvey's memory; no one can be more meticulous 
when his interest is aroused. To money he is in- 
different, but a misplaced word makes him shudder. 
Writing with him is an exhausting process, which 

51 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

probably accounts for the fact that his Hterary 
output has been small. But the same power of 
analysis and attention to detail have been most 
effective in his political activities. In these his 
divination has been prophetic and in his manipula- 
tion of contending elements he shows a dexterity 
that has baffled even the professional politicians. 

Harvey began his journalistic career upon the 
Peacham Patriot. Thence, with a borrowed ten 
dollar bill, he went to Springfield, serving his ap- 
prenticeship on the Republican, the best school of 
journalism in the country at that time. Later, on 
the Chicago Evening News, on the staff of which 
were Victor Lawson, Eugene Field, and Melville 
Stone, he completed his training. 

When he joined the staff of the New York World 
at the age of twenty-one he was a competent, if 
not a brilliant nevv^spaper man. His first important 
billet was the New Jersey editorship. This assign- 
ment across the river might very easily have been 
the first step toward a journalistic sepulcher, but 
not for Harvey. He made use of the post to 
garner an experience and knowledge of New Jersey 
politics that were to have an important bearing 
upon the career of Woodrow Wilson later. At the 
same time he attracted the attention of Joseph 

52 



GEORGE HARVEY 

Pulitzer who appointed him managing editor of the 
World before he was thirty. 

While directing the World's policy during the 
second Cleveland campaign, Harvey met Thomas 
F. Ryan and William C. Whitney, the financial 
backers of the Democratic party. This prepared 
the way for his step from Park Row to Wall Street 
after his break with Pulitzer. 

But the ways of Wall Street were not for Harvey. 
Nevertheless he was cautious enough to help him- 
self to some of the profits that were forthcoming in 
those days of great amalgamations. With com- 
mendable foresight, however much he might have 
despised the methods then prevalent in the fields 
of high finance, he acquired enough to make him 
independent, to follow his own bent, and strangely 
enough, in the acquiring he came to the conclusion 
that the Republic could not survive if the plunder- 
ing of the people by the "interests" continued as 
it was proceeding at that time. 

He withdrew from the Street and eventually 
purchased The North American Review. In the 
meantime J. P. Morgan and Company had under- 
written the bonds of the Harper publishing house 
and the elder Morgan asked Harvey to take charge 
of the institution. This he agreed to do with the 

53 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

understanding that he should be permitted to 
direct the poHcy of Harper's Weekly, one of the 
assets of the firm, without interference from the 
bankers. 

With his peculiar faculty for detecting the weak- 
nesses of financiers and politicians, Harvey now 
had before him an opportunity which was not 
afforded by the sedate old North American Review 
and he promptly took advantage of it. He had 
seen enough of the union of finance and politics to 
place little faith in either of the old parties. One 
was corrupt and powerful ; the other was weak and 
parasitical. In both organizations money was a 
compelling consideration. Not being accustomed 
to think in terms of party allegiance Harvey de- 
cided that the only remedy for a very bad situation 
was a militant Democracy. He had the organ; 
next he needed the leader. 

About this time, quite accidentally, he was 
present at Woodrow Wilson's inauguration as 
president of Princeton University. The professor 
appealed to the editor, — why, one can only conjec- 
ture. Perhaps it was a common abhorrence of 
machine politics, a passion for phrase turning, for 
there is a similarity in the methods of the two which 
separates them from the rank and file of ordinary 

54 



1 



GEORGE HARVEY 

politicians. Harvey scrutinized Wilson more care- 
fully, making a political diagnosis by a careful 
examination of his works, and decided that he was 
the man to turn the trick. 

But the gap between the presidency of Princeton 
and the Presidency of the United States was too 
wide to be taken at one leap. Harvey concluded 
that the governorship of New Jersey must be the 
intermediate step. The Democratic year of 1910 
provided the opportunity. 

The New Jersey politicians did not care about 
the college professor. They had already chosen a 
candidate, but Harvey induced them to change 
their minds. How this was accomplished is an 
absorbing political tale, too long to be narrated 
here. The New Jersey political leaders of that 
period will tell you that if Mr. Wilson's "forward- 
looking" men had controlled the convention he 
never would have been nominated. They will also 
tell you how Joseph Patrick Ttimulty opposed the 
nomination. They will even whisper that the con- 
tests were settled rather rapidly that memorable 
evening. After the nomination was annoimced, 
Mr. Wilson's managers escorted him to the conven- 
tion hall where he addressed a group of delegates 
who were none too enthusiastic. 

55 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

As they motored back to the hotel Mr. Wilson is 
reported to have asked: "By the way, gentleman, 
what was my majority?" 

To which Mr. Nugent replied cryptically: ''It 
was enough." 

The question, at least in the presence of these 
gentlemen, it is said was never asked again. 

Much has been said about the break between Mr. 
Harvey and Mr. Wilson. The published corres- 
pondence gives a fairly accurate picture of what 
happened at the Manhattan Club on the morning 
of the parting. I do not believe that Mr. Wilson 
dropped Colonel Harvey because he feared he was 
under Wall Street influence. The Harvey version 
sounds more plausible. According to this the erst- 
while university professor had learned the tech- 
nique of political strategy. He no longer felt that 
he was in need of guidance. 

' ' I was not surprised at the excuse he gave a little 
later when the break came," said Harvey. "I 
would not have been surprised at any excuse he 
offered." 

Mr. Harvey retired from the campaign. Har- 
per's Weekly had been wrecked, whether or not by 
the espousal of the Wilson cause, and he sold it to 
Norman Hapgood who buried it in due course. 

56 



GEORGE HARVEY 

George Harvey might or might not have had 
visions of an appointment to the Court of St. James 
at that time. It is at least certain that his dis- 
appointment was keen, taking a form of vindictive- 
ness which will survive as a distinct blot upon his 
career. In the preconvention campaign he aligned 
himself with the Champ Clark forces, but it was 
too late to undo the work he had done. 

This episode is necessary to an understanding of 
what happened later. His transfer from the Demo- 
cratic to the Republican party was a characteristi- 
cally bold move. How genuine his later allegiance 
may be is a question which more than one Re- 
publican would like to have answered, but there 
is no doubt of the success of his coup. He is, at 
least where he wanted to be, occupying the post 
which he considers, in point of importance, next 
to the presidency itself, Mr. Hughes notwith- 
standing. 

When the United States entered the war Harvey 
found himself in the secluded position of editor of 
the North American Review. This did not suit his 
disposition at all and he was very unhappy. He 
was too old to fight and it was not likely that he 
would be invited to Washington, In the meantime 
stories of mismanagement in the conduct of the 

57 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

war began to trickle out of the capital in devious 
undercurrents. The press, in a passive spirit of 
patriotism, was silent. Here was the opportunity. 

In January, 191 8, the first edition of the North 
Americafi Review War Weekly appeared. Its 
editor announced that its purpose was to help win 
the war by telling the truth, the whole truth, and 
nothing but the truth. He defied the Creels, the 
Daniels, and the Burlesons, adopting the motto, 
''To hell with the censors and bureaucrats." 

The journal was an instant success. Not only 
was it read with avidity but the Washington poli- 
ticians were flabbergasted at the audacity of a man 
who dared to print what the press associations and 
the dailies would not touch. I do not think there 
can be any doubt of the genuineness of Harvey's 
motives at this time. His journal was rigidly non- 
partisan. He spared no one whom he considered as 
an encumbrance in the winning of the war. |i 

The most striking evidence of his attitude to- 
ward the Republican party at this time is found in 
the edition of the Weekly of March 9, 1 9 1 8. Will H. 
Hays had just been elected chairman of the Re- 
publican National Committee. He made a speech 
extolling the virtues of his party. Of this Harvey 
made a stinging analysis denouncing Hays for in- 

58 



GEORGE HARVEY 

yoking partisan spirit at so perilous an hour, con- 
cluding with this paragraph: 

"As for Mr. Hays, with his insufferable claptrap 
about absolute unity as a blanket under which to 
gather votes while the very existence of the nation 
is threatened more ominously than anybody west 
of the Alleghanies — or in Washington, for that 
matter, — seems to realize, the sooner he goes home 
and takes his damned old party with him, the 
better it will be for all creation." 

Surely no uncertain language! One might have 
supposed that the Chairman of the Republican 
Committee would have done nothing of the kind, 
but he did. Again the Harvey method was effec- 
tive. Hays instead of resenting the denunciation 
wrote Harvey a rather abject letter, expressing the 
fear that he might have made a mistake in discuss- 
ing politics during the war and asked for an 
interview. 

Here another Harvey characteristic came into 
play. He did not assume the lofty role of mentor 
or prophet ; he very tactfully and gently tucked the 
young Indianian under his wing. Thenceforth 
there were no more oratorical blunders. 

Mr. Hays began to exhibit some capacity for 

59 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

leadership; his speeches improved. From that day 
until the election of 1920 he never made one with- 
out George Harvey's counsel and approval. 

This is as typical of Harvey as his audacity. He 
has a gentleness and charm quite unexpected in so 
savage a commentator. He will discuss and advise 
but he will not argue; and all of the time he will 
probe with uncanny accuracy for the weaknesses 
of those with whom he is dealing. It is rather by 
the weaknesses of others than by his own strength 
that he triumphs. 

Eight months after his meeting with Hays, 
Harvey came to Washington where his shadow 
was cast over the destinies of the Republican party, 
which at that time consisted of a dozen elements 
with little in common except a hatred of W^oodrow 
Wilson. 

It was an ideal situation for the exercise of Har- 
vey's peculiar talents. He met various factional 
leaders and before many weeks his house became 
their rendezvous, the G. H. Q. of the forces who 
weie to encompass the defeat of Wilson. Harvey 
iiatteied and cajoled and counselled, enjoying him- 
self immensely all of the time. This diversion was 
much more to his liking than the academic dignity 
of the editorship of the North American Review. 

60 



GEORGE HARVEY 

When President Wilson sailed away on his dis- 
astrous mission to Paiis, Harvey's Weekly threw 
aside all restraint. It cut and slashed indiscrimi- 
nately the President's policies. For the first time 
Harvey took on the guise of a Republican among 
Republicans. He even aided and abetted, with 
amused cynicism, the groping and fimibling of 
Republican leaders who were dazzled at the sudden 
break in the political clouds which had so long 
enshrouded them. He helped raise the funds used 
to counteract the league propaganda and toured 
the country in opposition to it. 

The next shift m scenes was as much beyond Mr. 
Harvey's power of manipulation as it was beyond 
most of the Republicans who now sagaciously give 
the impression that their hands weie on the ropes. 
Stories have been told of the gieat part Mr. Harvey 
played in the nomination of Mr. Harding. Mr. 
Harvey did not go to Chicago with the intention of 
supporting Mr. Harding any more than any other 
of the candidates, except Wood and Hiram John- 
son, whom he despised. 

He and the Senate oligarchy that coyly took the 
credit for nominating Mr. Harding turned to him 
when it was manifest that the machinery was 
stalled. Mr. Harding owes his nomination to a 

6i 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

mob of bewildered delegates. It was not due to a 
wisely conceived nor brilliantly executed plan. 

I doubt very much that George Harvey and 
President Harding had much in common until 
Harvey was invited to Marion. At that time the 
" irreconcilables " were beginning to be afraid that 
Elihu Root and William H. Taft were about to 
induce Mr. Harding to accept a compromise on the 
League of Nations. Harvey served the purpose of 
restoring the equilibrium. At the same time it is 
quite probable that the President was impressed 
by a mind so much more agile than his own. It was 
reasonably certain that it would not be diverted or 
misled by the intricacies of European diplomacy. 
And there was never any doubt of Harvey's 
Americanism. 

The President's selection of Mr. Harvey for the 
London post is, of course, accounted for in other 
ways. There are some persons who profess to 
believe that Mr. Harding preferred to have the 
militant editor in London and his Weekly in the 
grave rather than to have him as a censor of Wash- 
ington activities under the new regime. It can be 
said definitely that a sigh of relief went up from 
many a Republican bosom when the sacrilegious 
journal was brought to a timely end. And this did 

62 



GEORGE HARVEY 

not happen, it is to be observed, until the nomina- 
tion of George Harve}^ to the Coiirt of St. James 
was duly ratified and approved by the Senate of the 
United States. 

But if the Weekly has passed, the Republicans 
are still acutely conscious that Mr. Harvey is 
alive, — has he not reminded them of it in his first 
ambassadorial utterances? — and the journal is not 
beyond resuscitation. That is why Washington 
does not know whether to be chagrined or angry, 
whether to disavow or to condone. The discom- 
fited Republicans frankly do not know what to 
think of it and probably will not so long as the 
amazing ambassador makes his own rules. 



63 



^■■^ 




^^'t-p 





@ Harris and Ewing 



CHARLES EVANS HUGHES 



CHARLES EVANS HUGHES 

"Mais resiste-t-on a' la vertu? Les gens qui 
n'eurent point de faiblesses sont terribles, " ob- 
served Sylvestre Bonnard of the redoubtable 
Therese. 

This fearsomeness of the good is an old story. 
Horace remarked it, when, walking about near 
Rome, pure of heart and free from sin, he met a 
wolf. The beast quailed before his virtue and ran 
away, — to bark at the statue of the she wolf giving 
suck to Romulus, by way of intelligent protest. 

A similar prevalence of virtue and a similar 
romantic quality, where it is least to be expected, 
was disclosed in a recent encounter between Charles 
Evans Hughes, Secretary of State, and one of the 
irreconcilables, when Mr. Hughes, integer vitce 
scelerisque purus had just commissioned Colonel 
George Harvey to take the seat once occupied by 
Woodrow Wilson in the Supreme Council. 

When the news of this appointment reached the 

67 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

Capitol, Senator Brandegee, of Connecticut, hurried 
down to that structure across the street from the 
White House whose architectural style so markedly 
resembles the literary style of President Harding, 
the State War and Navy Building, ofhcial resi- 
dence of Mr. Hughes. 

Harvey being, in a sort, Brandegee's ambassador 
to the Court of Saint James, the Senator's object 
was to tell Mr. Hughes what Harvey should do in 
the Supreme Council. Mr. Brandegee has the gift 
of direct and forceful speech. In his earnestness, he 
dispenses with the elegancies and amenities. The 
upper ranges of his voice are not conciliatory. 

In this tone, he developed views regarding this 
country's foreign relations with which Mr. Hughes 
could not agree. The Secretary of State com- 
batted the Senator from Connecticut precisely as 
he combats coimsel of the other side when a 
$500,000 fee is at stake. The discussion was ener- 
getic and divergent. 

Mr. Brandegee hurried back to the Capitol and 
summoned other senators to his ofhce, all those 
who were especially concerned about the exposure 
of Colonel Harvey to European entanglements. 

He was excited. His voice was nasal. His 
language, in that select gathering, did not have to 

68 



CHARLES EVANS HUGHES 

be parliamentary. He told the senators that they 
could expect the Versailles treaty by the next White 
House messenger; that "that whiskered," — but 
nothing lies like direct quotes, — that "that whisk- 
ered" Secretary of State would soon get us into the 
League of Nations, being able for his purposes to 
wind President Harding about his little finger! 

His excitement in such an emergency naturally 
commimicated itself to his hearers. What to do? 
It was unanimously decided that the only adequate 
course was for Senator Henry Cabot Lodge to 
resign as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations 
Committee, by way of protest. 

Henry Cabot Lodge running away from his 
chairmanship would be Henry Cabot Lodge be- 
having as romantically as Horace's wolf. The good 
are terrible, as Anatole France said in the words 
with which this sketch begins. It is not so much 
that you can not resist them, as that they lead you 
to make such fools of yourselves. 

Mr. Hughes prevails, however, not merely by 
his virtue, but by his intelligence. His is the best 
mind in Washington ; to this everyone agrees, and 
it is not excessive praise, for minds are not common 
in the Government. 

Mr. Harding has not a remarkable one, the 

69 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

people having decided by seven million majority 
that it was best not to have one in the White House, 
choosing instead, a good heart, excellent intentions, 
and reasonable common sense. Mr. Hoover has a 
fine business instinct, great but diffused mental 
energy, but hardly an organized mind. From this 
point the Cabinet grades down to the Secretary of 
Labor, who, when Samuel Gompers, Jr., his Chief 
Clerk, addressed him before visitors as, "Mr. 
Secretary," said, "Please don't call me, 'Mr. 
Secretary,' Sam. Call me, 'Jim.' I'm more used 
to it." 

"Call me Jim" is the mental sea level of the 
Administration, by which altitudes are measured, 
so let us not exalt Mr. Hughes' mind unduly, but 
merely indicate what its habits are. Its operations 
were described to me by a member of the Cabinet, 
who said that no matter what subject was up for 
discussion at a Cabinet meeting, it was always the 
Secretary of State who said the final convincing 
word about it, simiming it all up, saying what 
everyone else had been trying to say but no one 
else had entirely succeeded in saying, simplifying 
it, and all with an air of service, not of self-asser- 
tion. 

Mr. Harding, speaking to an intimate friend, 

70 



CHARLES EVANS HUGHES 

said he had "two strong advisers, — Hughes and 
Hoover." 

It is a satisfaction, even though it is not a de- 
Hght, to come in contact with a mind like Mr. 
Hughes'; it is so definite, so hard and firm and 
palpable. You feel sure that it rests somewhere on 
the eternal verities. It is never agnostic. It has 
none of the morlaise of the twentieth century. Mr. 
Justice Brandeis, when Mr. Hughes was governor 
of New York and a reformer and progressive, said 
of him, "His is the most enhghtened mind of the 
eighteenth century." 

I think the Justice put it a century or two too 
late, for by the eighteenth century skepticism had 
begim to undermine those firm foundations of 
belief which Mr. Hughes still possesses. For him a 
straight line is the shortest distance between two 
points, — Einstein to the contrary, notwithstanding. 

Conclusions rest upon the absolute rock of 
principle, as morality for his preacher father rested 
upon the absolute rock of the Ten Commandments. 
There is no doubt, no uncertainty, no nuance, no 
on the one hand, on the other, no discursiveness, 
no yielding to the seductions of fancy, but a stem 
keeping of the faith of the syllogism ; a thing is so 
or it is not so. Mr. Hughes never hesitates. He 

71 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

never says, "I must think about that." He has 
thought about it. Or he turns instantly to his 
Principle and has the answer. 

You speak of Mr. Hughes to ten men in the 
Capitol, and nine of them will say to you, "Of 
course it is easy to understand; his is the one real 
mind in Washington." 

Everyone is impressed, for, starting with no other 
initiation into the mysteries of foreign relations 
than having had a father born in Wales and having 
spent his vacations in England, probably in the 
lake region studying the topography of Words- 
worth's poetry, — a certain oft detected resemblance 
to Wilson must make Wordsworth his favorite 
poet, as he was Wilson's, — in ten days was he not a 
great Secretary of State; and in three months the 
greatest Secretary of State? To be sure, back of 
him was the strongest nation on the earth, left so 
by the war, the one nation with resources, the 
creditor of all the others, to which a successful 
foreign policy would be naturally easy if it could 
only decide what that policy should be. 

It was left to Mr. Hughes to say what it should 
be. His discovery of the word "interests," 
amazed Washington; it was so obvious, so simple 
that no one else had thought of it. Mr. Hughes' 

72 



CHARLES EVANS HUGHES 

mind works like that; — hard, cold, unemotional, 
not to be turned aside, it simplifies everything, 
whether it be a treaty fight that has confused 
everyone else in the land, or a rambling Cabinet 
discussion; whether it be the mess in which the war 
left Europe, or the chaos in which watchful waiting 
left Mexico. His is a mind that delights in foiTnulae. 
He has one for Europe. He has one for Mexico. 
It is an analytical, not a synthetical mind, a 
lawyer's mind, not a creator's, like Wilson's, with, 
perhaps it may turn out, a fatal habit of over- 
simplification. Life is not a simple thing after all. 

But effective simplification is instantly over- 
whelming; and he made his brief announcement, 
a few days after taking office, that the United 
States had won certain things as a belligerent, that 
it had not got them, that he was going after them, 
that other countries could expect nothing from us 
until they had recognized oiu: rights and otir in- 
terests; he had completely routed the Senate, 
which had been opposing Wilson's ideals with 
certain ideals of its own, pitting Washington's 
farewell address against "breaking the heart of 
the world, " in a mussy statement of sentimentality. 

Mr. Hughes talked of islands and oil and dollars ; 
and the country came to its senses. Mr. Wilson 

73 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

had pictured us going into world affairs as an inter- 
national benefactor; it was sobby and suggested a 
strain on our pocketbooks. The Senate had pic- 
tured us staying out of them because our fathers 
had warned us to stay out and because the inter- 
national confidence men would cheat us; it was 
Smiday-school-booky and unflattering. Mr. 
Hughes said we should go in to the extent of ob- 
taining what was ours, and that we should stay 
out to the extent of keeping the others from obtain- 
ing what certainly was not theirs. It sounded 
grown-up ; as a Nation we belonged not to the sob- 
sisterhood, neither were we tied to the apronstring 
of the Mothers of the Constitution. 

Our national self-respect was restored. Truly, 
it required a mind to discover "interests" in the 
cloud of words that Mr. Wilson and the Senate had 
raised. Of course, it is all clear now, when every- 
body scorns idealism and talks glibly of interests. 
"Hobbs hints blue, straight he turtle eats; Nobbs 
prints blue, claret crowns his cup." But it was 
Hughes who "fished the murex up," who pulled 
"interests" out of the deep blue sea of verbal 
fuddlement. 

And thinking of our dollars, thanks to Mr. 
Hughes, we are made sane and whole, clearsighted 

74 



CHARLES EVANS HUGHES 

and unafraid, standing erect among the nations of 
the earth asking lustily for Yap. 

Our foreign relations had been the subject of 
passion. Mr. Hughes made them the subject of 
reason. Mr. Wilson could think of nothing but his 
hatred of Lodge, which rendered an agreement 
with the Senate impossible, and his hatred of Lloyd 
George and Marshal Foch, which rendered coopera- 
tion with the Allies and through it achievements 
in the foreign field that would have reconciled the 
public to his policies, equally impossible. 

Mr. Hughes looked at his task objectively. He 
saw the power of the United States. He saw how 
easy it was to exert that power diplomatically. He 
saw the simple and immediate concerns of the 
United States. Foch says that he won the war, 
"by smoking his pipe," meaning by keeping cool 
and regarding his means and ends with the same 
detachment with which he would study an old 
campaign of Napoleon. I do not know on what 
sedative Mr. Hughes wins his diplomatic victories, 
as he does not smoke a pipe ; — perhaps by reading 
the Sunday School Times. But like the French 
Marshal, he knows the secret of keeping his head. 
It is a great quality of mind not to lose it when you 
most need it. Mr. Hughes has it. Perhaps this is 

75 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

why Washington remarks his mind ; he always has 
it with him. 

" I am not thinking of myself in my work here, " 
he said once. "I don't care about immediate 
acclaim. I am counsel for the people of this coun- 
try. If a generation from now they think their 
interests have been well represented, that will be 
enough." 

He is coldly objective. 

Mr. Hughes comes by his coolness naturally. 
He was born to it, which is the surest way to come 
by anything. Men have hated him for it, coolness 
being a disconcerting quality, ever since he emerged 
from obscurity in New York during the insurance 
investigation, calHng it his "coldness" and adding 
by wa}^ of good measure the further specification, 
his "selfishness." 

If the last characterization is to stand, it should 
be amended to read, his "enhghtened selfishness." 
He has a good eye for his own interests. Roosevelt 
disliked him for it, because when governor and 
again when candidate for president, he refused to 
gravitate into the Roosevelt solar system, taking 
up his orbit like the rest of them about the Colonel. 
But think what happened to that system when the 
great stm of it went out ! 

76 



CHARLES EVANS HUGHES 

His political associates in New York hated him, 
accused him of being "for nothing but Hughes," 
when he quit them in the fight ' ' to hand the govern- 
ment back to the people" and went, on the invita- 
tion of President Taft, upon the Supreme Bench. 
But it was his only way out. If he had gone on 
working with them, he would still be "handing the 
government back to the people" along with, — but 
who were the great figures of 1910? He knows an 
expiring issue and its embarrassments by an un- 
erring instinct. He finds a new one, such as "our 
national interests, " with as svtre a sense. 

It is worth while casting a glance at him "smok- 
ing his pipe," when other real and false oppor- 
timities presented themselves to him; one finds 
discrimination. He refuses a Republican nomina- 
tion for Mayor of New York City when there is not 
a chance of electing a Republican Mayor of New 
York City. He accepts a Republican nomination 
for Governor of New York State, when the putting 
up of Hearst as the Democratic candidate makes 
the election of a Republican as Governor of New 
York State morally certain. He refuses the Re- 
publican nomination for President, in 191 2, when 
another, viewing himself and his party less objec- 
tively, through vanity perhaps, might have be- 

77 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

lieved that his own nomination was the one thing 
needed to prevent that year's RepubUcan cata- 
clysm. Four years later he accepts the Republican 
nomination for President, when as the result 
showed, there is at least a reasonable chance to win. 
He takes the post of Secretary of State when neg- 
lected opportunities lie ready to his hand and when 
the force of world events requires little more than 
his intelligent acquiescence to bring him diplo- 
matic success. 

His discovery of "interests" was no accident. 
It sprang from that hard unemotional simplifying 
habit of his mind. 

When one writes of Mr. Hughes, men ask, pardon- 
ably, "Which Mr. Hughes? The old Mr. Hughes, 
or the new Mr. Hughes?" for he has had, as the 
literary critics would say, his earlier and his later 
manner. 

But it is chiefly manner, a smile recently 
achieved, a different way of wearing the beard, a 
little less of the stem moralist, a little more of the 
man of the world. A connoisseur of Hughes, who 
has studied him for nearly twenty years, after a 
recent observation, pronounced judgment: "It's 
the same Hughes, a trifle less cold, but just as dry." 
And the Secretary of State himself, when one of the 

78 



CHARLES EVANS HUGHES 

weeklies contained an article on "The New Mr. 
Hughes," remarked, "People did not understand 
me then, that is all." 

These two eminent authorities being substan- 
tially agreed for the first time during many diver- 
gent years, there must be something in it. Mr. 
Hughes must be a gradually emerging personality. 
You take that new warmth, recently detected; Mr. 
Hughes himself knows it was always there. It is 
like the light ray of a star which has needed a 
million years to reach the earth ; it was always there 
but it required a long time to get across. 

Then the beard: — ^when Mr. Hughes was "hand- 
ing the government back to the people" in New 
York, it was a preacher's beard; you might have 
encoimtered its like anywhere among the circuit 
riders. Now it is a foreign secretary's beard; you 
might encotinter it in any European capital, — a 
world statesman's beard. The change of beard 
reveals the smile, which was probably always there, 
and the splendid large teeth. The nose, standing 
out in bolder relief, is handsomer and more dis- 
tinguished. You see more of Mr. Hughes than you 
used to and you gain by the improved vision. 

Something has dropped from him, however, 
beside the ends of the whiskers. I met him first 

79 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

when he was about to run for President in 191 6. 
An icy veil, Hke frozen mist, seemed to hang be- 
tween us. We talked through it ineffectively. 
When I saw him again as Secretary of State, that 
chill barrier had fallen away; to recur to my figure, 
he gradually emerges. 

Mr. Hughes of the later manner is, however, I 
am persuaded after long familiarity with his career, 
more truly Hughesian than the Hughes of the 
earlier manner ; just as the Henry James of the later 
manner is more explicitly Jamesian than the James 
of the earlier manner, and the Cabot Lodge of the 
present is much more irretrievably Cabotian than 
the Cabot Lodge who years ago stood with reluc- 
tant feet where the twin paths of scholarship and 
politics meet, — and part. 

I should say that Mr. Hughes was Bryan plus 
the advantages, which Mr. Bryan never enjoyed, 
of a correct Republican upbringing and a mind. 
The Republican upbringing and the mind have 
come of late years to preponderate. Looking at 
Mr. Hughes to-day, you could not tell him from a 
Republican, except perhaps by his mind, though 
such esoteric Republicans as Brandegee, Cabot 
Lodge, and Knox profess an ability to distinguish. 

But when he was "handing the government back 

80 



CHARLES EVANS HUGHES 

to the people" in New York, there was too much 
Bryan about him. The Repubhcans would have 
none of him, except as a choice of evils, — the 
greater evil being defeat. They called him ribald 
names . They referred to him scornfully as ' ' Wilson 
with whiskers," when they ran him, reluctantly, 
for the Presidency in 1916. His opponent being 
also of the Bryan school, and a minister's son at 
that, Hughes striving for an issue, failed to make it 
clear which was which, a doubt that remained until 
the last vote from California was finally counted 
after the election. This was the Mr. Hughes of 
the earlier manner. 

Latterly, Mr. Hughes has succeeded in estab- 
lishing the distinction which he did not succeed in 
making during that campaign. When he con- 
fronted the task of Secretary of State, he carefully 
studied the international career of Woodrow Wil- 
son, as a sort of inverse Napoleon, a sort of diplo- 
matic bad example. 

"This," he said to himself, "was a mistake of 
Wilson, ' ' and he noted it. " And this, ' ' he observed 
thoughtfully, "was another mistake of Wilson. I 
shall avoid it. " "This, " he again impressed on his 
memory, "was where Lloyd George and Clemen- 
ceau trapped him. I shall keep out of that pit." 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

His head, like a book of etiquette, is full of 
"Don'ts," diplomatic "Don'ts," all deduced from 
the experience of Wilson. 

The former President met Europe face to face. 
Mr. Hughes thanks his stars for the breadth of the 
Atlantic. The former President put his League of 
Nations first on his program. Mr. Hughes puts his 
League of Nations last, to be set up after every 
other question is settled. 

The former President tried to sell the Country 
pure idealism. Now as a people we have the habit 
of wars in which we seek nothing, but after which, 
in spite of ourselves, a little territory, a few islands, 
or a region out of which we subsequently carve 
half a dozen States, is found adhering to us. Mr. 
Wilson offered us a war in which, of course, we 
sought nothing and found, at the end of it, not the 
customary few trifles of territory, but the whole 
embarrassing, beggarly world adhering to us. The 
thumbscrew and the rack could not wring from Mr. 
Hughes the admission that we are after anything 
more lofty than our interests. 

One of the present Secretary's "Don'ts" of 

similar derivation is "Don't have a fight with the 

• Senate vmless you make sure first that you have the 

public with you." 

82 



CHARLES EVANS HUGHES 

Mr. Hughes does not run away from fights; he 
likes them. But beUeving God to be on the side 
with the most battahons, and intending scrupu- 
lously to observe this last "Don't," in order to 
secure the necessary popular support, he is as 
Secretary of State, "handing the government back 
to the people," just as he did when governor, — a 
little less self-consciously, perhaps, a little less 
noisily, but still none the less truly. 

He is the most democratic Secretary of State this 
Coimtry has ever had, and this includes Bryan to 
whose school, as has just been remarked, he origi- 
nally belonged. If we are ever to have democratic 
control of foreign relations, it will be by the meth- 
ods of Mr. Hughes, because of the training and 
beliefs of Mr. Hughes, and as a consequence of the 
most undemocratic control of foreign relations 
which our Constitution attempted to fasten upon 
us. 

A successful foreign policy requires public under- 
standing and support. The makers of the Con- 
stitution established in our government a nice 
balance of powers between the various depart- 
ments, beautifully adjusted until someone thought 
of putting a stone into one side of the balance. 
That stone is the people. The Fathers of the Con- 

83 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

stitution had not noticed it. The executive put it 
into its end of the balance some years ago, and 
the legislative has been kicking the beam ever 
since. One nice bit of balancing was that between 
the Senate and the Executive on treaty making. 
In foreign relations, the President can do every- 
thing, and he can do nothing without the approval 
of two thirds of the Senate. It is a nice balance, 
which broke the heart of John Hay, frittered away 
the sentimentalities of Mr. Bryan, and destroyed 
Mr. Wilson. 

No one ever thought of putting the stone into it 
until the Senate did so two years ago, by discussing 
the Versailles treaty in the open, right before the 
public. The people got into the scale, and Mr. 
Wilson hit the sky. 

Mr. Hughes observed what happened. He is 
determined that the stone this time shall go in on 
his end of the balance. He talks to the country 
daily. He takes the people into his confidence, 
telling all that can be told and as soon as it can be 
told. He makes foreign relations hold front pages 
with the Stillman divorce case. He makes no step 
without carrying the country with him. He comes 
as near conducting a daily referendum on what we 
shall do for our "interests " as in a country so big as 

84 



CHARLES EVANS HUGHES 

ours can be done ; and that is democratic control of 
foreign relations, initiated by the Senate, for its 
own undoing. 

Into that balance where he is placing the stone, 
he will put more of mankind's destinies than any 
other man on earth holds in his hands to-day. His 
has been a long way up from the shy, sensitive 
youth that one who knew him when he was be- 
ginning the law describes to me. He was then un- 
imaginably awkward, incapable of unbending, a 
wet blanket socially. An immense effort of will has 
gone into fashioning the agreeable and habitual 
diner-out of to-day, into profiting by the mistakes 
of the New York governorship, of the campaign of 
1916. 

One sees still the traces of the early stiffness ; the 
face is sensitive; the eyes drop, seldom meeting 
yours squarely; when they do, they are the mild 
eyes of the Church ! I suppose the early experiences 
of the Church help him. 

His attitude toward Colonel Harvey's and other 
of the President's diplomatic appointments takes 
its color from his good father's attitude toward the 
problem of evil. God put evil in the world, and it 
is not for man to question. The President sends the 
Harveys abroad; they are not Mr. Hughes', but 

85 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

his own personal representatives. It is not for Mr. 
Hughes to question. 

He grows a better Republican every day. And 
the Republicans of the Senate are not reconciled. 
They feel like the man who saw the hippopotamus : 

If he should stay to tea, I thought, 
There won't be much for us. 

There won't be much for them. Enthusiasm 
grows among them over his admirable fitness for 
reinterment on the Supreme Bench. 



86 




Hams and Ewing 



EDWARD MANDELL HOUSE 



EDWARD M. HOUSE 

The nature of Colonel Edward M. House was 
fully revealed by a story of his youth, which he 
told me at Paris in the concluding moments of the 
Peace Conference. He was elated and confident. 
The compromises in which he delighted had been 
made. The gifts had all been bestowed — of terri- 
tory which men will have to fight for to keep, of 
reparations which will never be paid, of alliances 
which will never be carried out, of a League of 
Nations which the Colonel's own Nation will 
never enter. 

Looking the work over with that blindness with 
which men are struck who are under the dominion 
of another and stronger man's mind, his gentle 
soul was flooded with happiness. He was as 
near boasting as one of his modest habits could be, 
as his mind turned to the wisdom of his youth 
which had brought forth this excellent fruit. 

"I got my first real sight of politics," he said, 

89 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

"when I was a boy in Cornell University. My 
great chum there was young Morton, a son of the 
-^ -^ ^} Democratic war governor of Indiana. The Hayes- 
' Tilden contest over the Presidency was being de- 
cided. Morton and I used to run away from 
Ithaca to Washington during that absorbing fight. 
By reason of his father's position in the Democratic 
party, he could get in behind the scenes as few 
young men could; and he took me with him. I 
saw the whole amazing thing. I made up my 
mind then and there that only three or four men 
in this country counted, and that there was little 
chance of rising to be one of those three or four by 
the ordinary methods." 

He was, when he said this, at the apex of his 
career, behind the scenes of the greatest World 
Congress ever held, following the greatest War the 
world had ever known. And he had been behind the 
scenes as had no other man, in Europe as a privi- 
leged onlooker with both belligerents, and in 
America as the confidant of tremendous events. 

He was there, as in his college days, at the Hayes- 
Tilden contest, by grace of a friend whose influence 
had been sufficient to secure him his opportunities. 
The parallel was in his mind, and he regarded it 
with self-approval. He had chosen his course and 

90 



EDWARD M. HOUSE 

chosen it wisely. It had led him to the greatest 
peace-making in history. 

There was a little more self -revelation. He and 
Morton had prepared for college with Yale in view. 
But Morton had flunked his entrance examina- 
tions at Yale and afterward succeeded in passing 
the Cornell tests. House had gone to Cornell to be 
with his friend, an early indication of a capacity 
for self-effacement, for attachment to the nearest 
great man at hand who could take him behind the 
scenes. 

The mystery of Colonel House is that he has been 
possessed all his life, almost passionately, with 
that instinct which makes boys run to fires. His 
fastening upon the favorably placed, whether it 
was Morton in his youth, or Wilson in his maturity, 
was not ordinary self-seeking, not having for its 
object riches or power or influence. It was merely 
desire to see for the pure love of seeing. 

His is a boundless curiosity about both men and 
events. His eyes are the clue to his character. 
Boardman Robinson, with the caricaturist's gift 
for catching that feature which exhibits character, 
said to me one day during the War, "I just passed 
Colonel House on the street. The most wonder- 
ful seeing eyes I ever saw!" 

91 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

Nature had made Colonel House all eyes — 
trivial in figure, undistinguished, slightly ludicrous, 
almost shambling, shrinking under observation so 
that he gained a reputation for mystery, with only 
one feature to catch yoiir attention, a most amaz- 
ingly fine pair of eyes. It was as if nature had 
concentrated on those eyes, treating all the puny 
rest of him with careless indifference. They are 
eyes that delight in seeing, eyes to seek a place 
in the first row of the grand stand of w^orld events, 
eyes that turn steadily outward upon objective 
reality. Not the eyes of a visionary — House got 
his visions of the brotherhood of man and the rest 
of it at second-hand from Wilson — eyes that glow 
not with the internal fires of a great soul, but with 
the intoxication of the spectacle. 

And with the eyes nature had given House an 
unerring instinct for getting where, with his small 
figure, he could see. The ego of the passionate 
spectator is as peculiar as that of the book col- 
lector or the curiosity himter. Given a shoulder 
tall enough the diminutive House perches upon 
it, like a small boy watching a circus parade from 
his father's broad back, whether the shoulder be 
Morton's in his youth, or Wilson's in his maturity. 

Some have tried to explain House by saying that 

92 



EDWARD M. HOUSE 

he had the vanity of loving familiarity with the 
great; but I doubt if House cared for kings, as 
kings, any more than a bibliomaniac cares for jade. 
He wanted to see; and kmgs were merely tall ob- 
jects on which to perch and regard the spectacle. 

He remained simple and unaffected by his con- 
tacts with Europe, did none of the vulgar aping of 
the toady, coming away from the Peace Confer- 
ence an unconscious provincial, who said "Eye- 
talian" in the comic-paper way, and Fiume pro- 
nouncing the first syllable as if he were exclaiming 
"Fie! for shame !"^ — an unspoiled Texan who must 
have cared as little what kings and potentates 
thought of him as a newsboy watching a baseball 
game cares for the accidental company of a bank 
president. 

The world has been good to Colonel House, ac- 
cording to his standards. He has realized his am- 
bition to the fullest. Life has given him all he 
wanted, the privilege of seeing, more abundantly 
than to any other in his generation, perhaps in all 
time ; for he is history's greatest spectator. 

He is glad. His heart is full. He wishes to 
give in return. He is the kindest-hearted man 
who has ever had empires at his disposal. He 
wants to give, give, give. He wants to make 

93 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

happy. He was the fairy godmother of Europe, 
the diplomatic Carnegie, who thought it a disgrace 
to die diplomatically rich. 

For many months I saw him almost daily at 
Paris. His was a heart of gold, whether in personal 
or international relations ; but a heart of gold does 
not make a great negotiator. Perverse and na- 
tionalistic races of men, incredulous of the mil- 
lenium, keep their hearts of gold at home when 
they go out to deal with their neighbors. 

It was difficult for Colonel House to say no. 
He might go so far as to utter the first letter of that 
indispensable monosyllable; but before he accom- 
plished the vowel, his mind would turn to some 
happy "formula" passing midway between no 
and yes. He was fertile in these expedients. Daily 
he would talk of some new "formula," for Fiume, 
for Dantzig, for the Saar Valley, for the occupation 
of the Rhine, for Shantung, always happily, al- 
ways hopefully. The amiable William Allen White 
hit off his disposition perfectly when he said 
House's daily prayer was, "Give us this day our 
daily compromise." 

When he split a hair between the south and 
southwest side, it was not for logistic pleasure; it 
was to divide it with splendid justice and send 

94 



EDWARD M. HOUSE 

each of two rival claimants away happy in the pos- 
session of exactly half of the slender filament, so 
that neither would be empty handed. I never saw 
a man so overjoyed as he was one day late in April 
or early in May when M. Clemenceau had left his 
rooms in the Hotel Crillon w4th the promise of 
Franco- American defensive alliance. 

"The old man," he said, "is very happy. He 
has got what he has been after. I can't tell you 
just now what it is. But he has got it at last." 

He had been the donor, for Mr. Wilson, of the 
exact southwest side of a hair, the promise to sub- 
mit, without recommendations, an alliance to the 
United States Senate, which had little prospect of 
ever being accepted by this country. The sight 
of the French Premier's happiness made him 
radiant. 

It was not merely because representatives of 
foreign governments found Colonel House easy to 
see when they could not gain access to President 
Wilson that kept a throng running to his quarters 
in the Crillon ; it was because there they found the 
line of least resistance. There was the readiest 
sympathy. There was the greatest desire to 
accommodate. He sought always for a formula 
that would satisfy the claims of all. 

95 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

A man so ready to compromise is actuated by no 
guiding principle. Mr. Scott, the editor of the 
Manchester Guardian, said when President Wilson 
was in England; "Yes, Lloyd George is honestly 
for the League of Nations. But that won't pre- 
vent him from doing things at Paris which will be 
utterly inconsistent with the principle of such a 
league. It isn't intellectual dishonesty; but Lloyd 
George hasn't a logical mind. He doesn't under- 
stand the implications of his own position." 

Neither did Colonel House at Paris. The 
League of Nations was an emotion with him, not a 
principle. It was a tremendous emotion. He 
spoke of it in a voice that almost broke. I remem- 
ber his glowing eyes and the little catch in his 
throat as he said, at Paris, "The politicians don't 
•like the League of Nations. And if they really 
knew what it would do to them, they would like it 
still less." 

But, for all that naive faith in the wonders it 
would do. Colonel House had not thought out the 
League of Nations, and was quite incapable of 
thinking it out, for he is not a man of analytical 
mind ; and what mental power he had was inhibited 
by the glow of his feelings. His temperature was 
above the thinking point. Thus, like Mr. Lloyd 

96 



EDWARD M. HOUSE 

George, he could make compromises that played 
ducks and drakes with his general position, since 
he had no real understanding of the League, which 
was not an intellectual conviction with him, ardu- 
ously arrived at, but which possessed his soul as 
by an act of grace, like an old-fashioned religious 
conversion. 

He was loyal at heart to Mr. Wilson and to 
everything that was Mr. Wilson's, his mind being 
absorbed into Mr. Wilson's, and having no inde- 
pendent existence. There are natures which de- 
mand an utter and unquestioning loyalty in those to 
whom they yield their confidence, and Mr. Wilson's 
was of that sort, as a remark of his about Secretary 
Colby will indicate. 

When Mr. Lansing was removed from office, the 
coimtry was astounded to learn that he was to be 
succeeded by Bainbridge Colby. The President 
communicated his decision first to one of the few 
who then had access to his sick room. This ad- 
viser ventxured to expostulate. 

"Mr. Colby," he said, "is brilliant, but he is 
uncertain. His whole career has lacked stability. 
He is not known to have the qualities which the 
Nation has been taught to expect in a Secretary of 
State." 

7 97 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

"At any rate," replied the President sharply, 
"he is loyal." 

At any rate, Colonel House was loyal. 

The ego of Mr. Wilson demanded and received 
utter loyalty from him, a loyalty that forbade 
thinking, forbade criticism, forbade independence 
of any sort. Moreover, Colonel House was in 
contact with a mind much stronger than his, with a 
personality much more powerful than his. He was 
caught into the Wilson orbit. He revolved about 
Mr. Wilson. He got his light from Mr. Wilson, 
who had that power, which Colonel Roosevelt had, 
of irradiating minor personalities. Colonel House 
was nothing until he gravitated to Mr. Wilson. 
He is going back to be nothing to-day, nothing but 
a kind, lovable man, a gentle soul rather unfitted 
for the world, with an extraordinary capacity for 
friendship and sympathy, and that fine pair of 
eyes. 

I remember at Paris the affecting evidences of 
the little man's loyalty to his great friend, of whom 
he could not speak without emotion. He was 
never tired of dilating upon the wonder of President 
Wilson's mind. 

"I never saw," he would say, "so quick a mind, 
with such a capacity for instant understanding. 

98 



EDWARD M. HOUSE 

The President can go to the bottom of the most 
difficult question as no one else in the world can." 

House's endless "formulae" always bore the 
self-effacing condition, "if Mr. Wilson approves." 
"If Mr. Wilson approves " was the D. V. of Colonel 
House's religion. Too much awe of another mind 
is not good for your own, or carries with it certain 
implications about your own. 

Colonel House's loyalty to Mr. Wilson did not, 
however, make him hate the men at Paris who 
stood across the President's path. The personal 
representative's heart was too catholic for that. 
He 

Liked what e're he looked on 
And his looks went everywhere. 

He had a kindly feeling for the "old man," 
Clemenceau. He was a warm friend of Orlando, 
with whom Mr. Wilson had his quarrel over 
Fiume. He though well of Lloyd George, whom 
Mr. Wilson went abroad hating. 

The Peace Conference was to him a personal 
problem. Peace was peace between Wilson and 
Clemenceau and Lloyd George and Orlando. Com- 
promises were an accommodation among friends. 

99 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

I never saw a man so utterly distressed as he was 
when President Wilson threatened to break up the 
Peace Conference and sent for the George Washing- 
ton to take him home from Brest. It was as if his 
own dearest friends had become involved in a violent 
quarrel. He did not see the incident in terms of 
the principles involved, but only as the painful 
interruption of kindly personal relations. Men 
speak of him sometimes as the one of our commis- 
sioners who knew Europe; and Europeans, appre- 
ciating his sympathy, have fostered this idea by re- 
ferring to his understanding of Eiu'opean problems. 

But the Europe Colonel House knew was a per- 
sonal Europe. The countries on his map were 
Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando. The 
problems of his Europe were Lloyd George, 
Clemenceau, and Orlando. He knew what Lloyd 
George wanted. He knew what Clemenceau 
wanted. He knew what Orlando wanted. That 
was enough. 

His kindness of heart, his desire for pleasant per- 
sonal relations, his incapacity to think in terms of 
principles, whether of the League of Nations or not, 
betrayed him in the matter of Shantung. Whether 
the Peace Conference should return Shantung to 
China, or leave it to Japan to return to China was 

lOO 



EDWARD M. HOUSE 

to him, he often said, "only a question of method. 
There is no principle involved." The Japanese 
were a sensitive people, why should a kind heart 
question the excellence of their intentions with 
respect to China? Shantung would of course be 
returned. It was only a question of how. 

The simple heart of Colonel House did not save 
him, either as a diplomat or as a friend. The 
failures at Paris plunged Mr. Wilson into depres- 
sion in which he went as far down into the valley 
as he had been up on the heights during his vision 
of a world made better by his hand. In his darker 
moments he saw nothing but enmity and dis- 
loyalty about him — even, a little later, "usurpa- 
tion" in the case of the timorous and circumspect 
Mr. Lansing. 

Colonel House says that he does not yet know 
what caused the breach between the President and 
himself. Relations stopped ; that was all. 

This is what occurred: Shortly after Colonel 
House had convinced the President that the dis- 
posal of Shantung was only a question of method 
he disappeared from Paris "to take a rest " ; and it 
became known that after all he was not to sit in 
the Council of the League of Nations representing 
America, as Mr. Wilson had originally intended. 

101 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

At this time, a close friend of President Wilson 
and one of his most intimate advisers, said to me, 
"The most insidious influence here is the social 
influence." 

British entertainment of members of the House 
family had been marked and assiduous, and the 
flattery had had its effect, though not probably 
upon the Colonel, who remained unspoiled by 
social contacts to the last. Nevertheless, a mem- 
ber of Mr. Wilson's family had called the Presi- 
dent's attention to the social forces that the British 
were bringing to bear. The President by this time 
was in a mood to be made angry and suspicious. 
Doubt was lodged in his mind. And when he 
found this country critical of the Shantung settle- 
ment, that doubt became a conviction; the British 
through social attentions, had wheedled House into 
a position favorable to their allies, the Japanese. 
The loyal House was convicted of the one unfor- 
givable offense, disloyalty. 

When the casting off of House became, later, in 
this country unmistakable, I inquired regarding it 
of the friend and adviser of the President whom I 
have just mentioned, and he repeated to me, 
forgetting that he used them before, the exact 
words he had said at Paris, "The most insidious 

102 



EDWARD M. HOUSE 

influence at the Peace Conference was the social 
influence." 

The most insidious influence with Colonel 
House was the kindness of his own heart. He had 
too many friends. His view of international rela- 
tions was too personal. Principles will make a 
man hard, cold, and unyielding, and Colonel House 
had no principles, or had them only parrot -like 
from Mr. Wilson. He was the human side of the 
President, who for those contacts which his office 
demanded had found a himian side necessary and 
accordingly annexed the amiable Texan. 

Wilson's himian side had offended him, and he 
cut it off, accordingly to the scriptural injunction 
against the offending right hand. The act was 
cruel, but it was just, as just as the dismissal of 
Mr. Lansing; for House failed Wilson at Paris, 
being one of Wilson's greatest sources of weakness 
there. His excessive optimism, his kindheartedness, 
his creduHty, his lack of independence of mind, his 
surrender of his imagination to a stronger imagina- 
tion, his conception of politics not as morals but 
as the adjustment of personal differences, left 
Wilson without a capable critical adviser at the 
Conference. 
When House talked to Wilson, it was a weaker 

103 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

Wilson talking to the real Wilson. Colonel House 
in retirement and since the breach, is still Colonel 
House, kindhearted and unobtrusive. He has 
seen, and he is satisfied. He has a fine and per- 
haps half-unconscious loyalty to the great man 
from whose shoulders he surveyed the world. His 
is an ego that brushes itself off readily after a fall 
and asks for no alms of sympathy. 

He does not, like Mr. Lansing, fill five hundred 
octavo pages with "I told you so," and you can 
not conceive of his using that form of self- 
justification. 

I hope to see him some day playing Santa Claus 
in a children's Christmas celebration at a village 
church ! 



104 




Harris and Ewing 



HERBERT CLARK HOOVER 



HERBERT HOOVER 

One reads in the press daily of Hughes and 
Hoover, or Mellen and Hoover, or Davis and 
Hoover, or Wallace and Hoover. If it is a ques- 
tion of foreign relations, it is the Secretary of State 
and Hoover. If it has to do with using our power 
as a creditor nation to compel the needy foreigners to 
buy here in spite of the tariff wall we are going to 
erect against their selling here, it is the Secretary 
of the Treasury and Hoover. If strikes threaten, 
it is the Secretary of Labor and Hoover. If the 
farmers seek more direct access to the markets, it 
is the Secretary of Agriculture and Hoover. 

It is always "and Hoover." What Mr. Hughes 
does not know about international affairs — and 
that is considerable — Mr. Hoover does. What 
Mr. Mellen does not know about foreign finance — 
and that is less — Mr. Hoover does. What Mr. 
Davis does not know about labor — and that is 
everjrthing — Mr. Hoover does. What Mr. Wal- 

107 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

lace does not know about farm marketing — and 
that is nothing — Mr. Hoover does. 

Herbert Hoover is the most useful supplement 
of the administration. He possesses a variety of 
experiences, gained in making money abroad, in 
administering the Belgian relief, in husbanding 
the world's food supply after our entrance into 
the War, in helping write the peace treaty, which 
no one else equals. He is as handy as a diction- 
ary of dates or a cyclopedia of useful information, 
invaluable books, which never obtain their just 
due; for no one ever signs his masterpiece with the 
name of its coauthor, thus, by "John Smith and 
the Cyclopedia of Useful Information." 

A bad particle to ride into fame behind, that 
word "and," begetter of much oblivion! Who 
can say what goes after the "and" which follows 
the name McKmley, or Hayes, or Cleveland, or 
even Roosevelt? Who has sufficient "faith in 
Massachusetts" to remember long the decorous 
dissyllable connected by "and" with the name 
Harding? The link, "and," is not strong enough 
to hold. You recall the "and"; that is all; 
as in the case of that article of food, origin of 
many "calories," to use Mr. Hoover's favorite 
word, in the quick-serve resorts of the himible, 

io8 



HERBERT HOOVER 

where it supplements ably and usefully, but -with- 
out honorable mention, slender portions of beef, 
pork, and ham. 

To describe briefly, in a phrase, what has hap- 
pened to Hoover; two years ago, it was "Hoover"; 
to-day, it is "and Hoover." 

Why the connective? Because, to put it bluntly, 
however great his other gifts are — and they are 
remarkable — he lacks political intelligence. He 
reminds one now of a great insect caught in the 
meshes of a silken web. He struggles this way and 
that. He flutters his wings, and the web of poli- 
tics fastens itself to him with a hundred new 
contacts. 

Facing possible elimination from public life, he 
accepted a dull and unromantic department under 
Pesident Harding. He was told that he could 
* ' make something of it . " Modern Greeks bearing 
gifts always bring you an opportunity which "you, 
and you alone, can make something of." He is 
trying to make something of it, something more 
than Mr. Harding and the party advisers intended 
when they gave him the Secretaryship of Com- 
merce. He is trying to dramatize some turn of 
fate and be once more a "big figure." He is tire- 
less. He arrives at his office fabulously early. 

109 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

Clerks drop in their tracks before he leaves at 
night. He has time to see everyone who would 
see him; for he can never tell when "the man with 
the idea" will knock at his door. Unlike the 
British naval officer charged with the duty of ex- 
amining inventions to win the War, who is de- 
cribed by Guedalla as sitting like an inverted 
Micawber "waiting for something to turn down," 
he is waiting for something to turn up. He does 
more than wait; he works twenty hours a day 
trying to turn something up. 

And he will turn something up. The chances 
are that he will do as much for the infant foreign 
trade of this country as Alexander Hamilton did 
for the infant finances of this country. He promises 
to be the most useful cabinet officer in a generation. 
But this is less than his ambition. If he were an 
unknown man, it would be enough; but you 
measure him by the stature of Hoover of the Bel- 
gian Relief. Like the issue of great fathers, he is 
eclipsed by a preceding fame. As well be the son 
of William Shakespeare as the political progeny of 
Hoover, The Food Administrator ! 

The War spoiled life for many men; for Wilson, 
for Baruch, for Hoover. After its magnificent 
amplifications of personality, it is hard to descend 

no 



HERBERT HOOVER 

to every day, and be not a tremendous figure, 
but a successful secretary of an unromantic 
department. 

He might concentrate with advantage to his 
future fame. A brief absence from front pages, 
imder the connective "and," would cause the pub- 
lic heart to grow fonder when he did "make 
something" of his own department. 

But two disqualifications stand in his way; — his 
lack of political intelligence, and his consequent 
inability to make quick decisions in a political 
atmosphere. His present diffusion of his energies 
springs, I think, from indecision; for in politics 
he can not make up his mind, as he can in business, 
where the greatest profit lies. 

I first heard of this weakness of his when he was 
Food Administrator in Washington, and when 
other members of the Wilson War Administration, 
equal in rank with him and having to cooperate 
with him, complained frequently of his slowness. 
He had able subordinates, they said, the leading 
men in the various food industries, and they had 
to make up his mind for him. I set this charge 
down, at the time, to jealousy and prejudice, Mr. 
Hoover being always an outsider in the Wilson 
administration; but the long delay and immense 

III 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

difficulty he made over deciding, although all his 
life a Republican, whether he was or was not a 
Republican in the campaign of 1920, seemed all the 
proof of indecision that was needed. 

It soimds like heresy about one who has been 
advertised as he has ; but remember that we know 
little about him except what the best press agents 
in history have said of him. He achieved his 
professional success in the Orient, far from observa- 
tion, and his financial success far from American 
eyes. His public career in the relief of Belgium 
and in the administration of food was the object 
of world-wide good will. And, moreover, inde- 
cision in politics is common enough among men who 
are strong and able in other activities. Mr. Taft 
was a great judge but wrecked his administration 
as President by inability to make up his mind. 
Senator Kellogg was a brilliantly successful lawyer; 
but in public life he is so hesitant that Minnesota 
politicians speak of him as "Nervous Nelly," and 
even Mr. Taft, during the Treaty fight, rebuked 
him to his face for lack of courage. 

Mr. Hoover's face is not that of a decisive char- 
acter. The brow is ample and dominant ; there is 
vision and keen intelligence ; but the rest of the face 
is not strong, and it wears habitually a wavering 

112 



HERBERT HOOVER 

self-conscious smile. This smile, as if everybody 
were looking at him, makes him remind one as he 
comes out of a Cabinet meeting of a small boy in a 
classroom carrying a bouquet of flowers up to his 
teacher. He has, moreover, a strain of pessimism 
in his nature, which may account for his indecision. 
You catch him in moods of profound depression. 
He was in one just before his appointment to the 
Cabinet, when his European relief work was not 
going to his liking, and when the politicians, he 
felt, were forcing him into a position of little scope 
and opportimity. 

In politics, he has enough vanity and self-con- 
sciousness to be aware constantly of forces opposed 
to him, covert, hostile, unscrupulous, personal 
forces — forces that he does not understand. Give 
him a mining problem, he can reckon with the 
forces of nature that have to be overcome. Give 
him a problem of finance, he knows the enmities 
of finance. He is in his element. In politics he 
is not. He is baffled. 

An illustrative incident occurred in the spring 
of 1920, when both parties were talking of him as 
their candidate for President and he was uncertain 
whether he was a RepubHcan or not. Mr. Hearst, 
in his newspapers, published an attack upon him, 

8 113 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

saying that he was more Briton than American, 
and to prove it printed a list of British corporations 
of which he was a director. 

All his suspicions were aroused over this every- 
day occurrence of politics. Where had Mr. Hearst 
obtained the unforttinate information? He saw 
plots and treachery. Someone in his confidence 
must have betrayed him for money. A careful 
investigation was made, and it was discovered 
that the editor had drawn upon "Who's Who," to 
which Mr. Hoover himself had furnished the 
information before he began thinking of the 
Presidency. 

The politicians tricked him so completely in the 
preconvention campaign of 1920 that he has the 
best reasons for distrusting himself. He was al- 
ways, during that campaign, a candidate for the 
Republican nomination to the Presidency. At 
the very time when his spokesman, Julius Barnes, 
was saying for him that he could not choose be- 
tween the two parties imtil he had seen their 
candidates and read their platforms, and when the 
Democrats were most seriously impressed with his 
availability, the manager of his paper in Washing- 
ton said to me, "This talk of Hoover for the Demo- 
cratic nomination is moonshine. He won' t take it." 

114 



HERBERT HOOVER 

"Why not," I asked him. 

"Because," he repHed, "he does not think it is 
worth having," a qiiite practical reason which 
differed wholly from the official explanation that 
Mr. Hoover was waiting to see which party was 
progressive so that he might oppose reaction. 

His subsequent support of the more conservative 
candidate and the more conservative party bore 
out the truth of what his newspaper manager had 
said. And in reality, Mr. Hoover is as conserva- 
tive as Mr. Harding himself, being a large capital- 
ist with all the conservatism of the capitalist class. 

A little while ago, Mr. Roosevelt had made it 
imfashionable to admit that you were conserva- 
tive. You wished it to be understood that you 
were open-minded — "forward looking," as Mr. 
Wilson, who turned reactionary at the test, called 
it; that you were broad, sympathetic, free from 
mean prejudices, progressive, in short. Our very 
best reactionaries of to-day all used to call them- 
selves progressive. Some still do. 

The yoimg editor of a metropolitan newspaper, 
bom to great wealth, and imbibing all the narrow- 
ness of the second generation, once asked me in 
those bright days when everybody was thrilling 
over his "liberality," "Would you call me a radi- 
us 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

cal, or just a progressive?" He was "just a pro- 
gressive." In a somewhat similar sense, Mr. 
Hoover was quite imconsciously "just a progres- 
sive" — a belated follower of a pleasant fashion, 
having lived abroad too long when he made his 
announcement to note the subtle changes that had 
taken place in our thinking — the rude shock that 
Russia had given to our "liberality." 

But living abroad, it is only fair to add, has 
created a difference between his conservatism and 
that, let us say, of Judge Gary. He has grown 
used to labor unions and even to labor parties, so 
that they do not frighten him. His is conserva- 
tism, none the less, definite conservatism, if more 
enlightened than the obscurant American variety. 

His hesitation and indecision in the spring of 
1920 thus did not spring from doubt of the Re- 
publican party's progressiveness. He always de- 
sired the Republican nomination; but his vanity 
would suffer by the open seeking of it and the 
defeat which seemed likely; and his sensitiveness 
would suffer from the attacks, like that of Mr. 
Hearst, which an open candidacy would entail; for 
he is at once vain and thin-skinned. 

Springing thus from reluctance to make up his 
mind, the announcement was received as the evi- 

116 



HERBERT HOOVER 

dence of a very large mind. Among the public, 
Mr. Hoover was taken for a man who cared more 
for principle than for party or for politics. Among 
the politicians, he assumed the proportions of a 
portent, with a genius for politics second only to 
that of Roosevelt himself, who in a difficult situa- 
tion could take the one position and say the one 
thing that might force his nomination. 

The Democrats pricked up their ears. Mr. 
Wilson, sick and discouraged, began to entertain 
hopes of a candidate who would save the De- 
mocracy from ruin. Homer Cimimings, National 
Chairman of Mr. Wilson's party, began to regard 
Mr. Hoover's possible nomination favorably. The 
Republican managers became alarmed. They 
knew from Mr. Hoover's friends that he, as his 
Washington newspaper manager had said, thought 
the Democratic nomination not worth having ; but 
they feared lest by the course he was pursuing he 
might make it worth having, might take it, and 
might rob them of the election which they felt 
safely theirs. If they could induce him to de- 
clare his Republicanism, the Democrats would 
drop him, the public would cease to be interested 
in him as a dramatic personality too big for party 
trammels, and they themselves could ignore him. 

117 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

It was decided to have him read out of the Re- 
publican party as a warning to him of how he was 
imperiling his hopes of the only nomination he 
valued, and at the same time have Republican 
leaders go to him or his friends and advise him and 
them that if he would only declare his Republican- 
ism, a popular demand would force his nomination 
at Chicago. 

Senator Penrose was chosen as the Republican 
whose pontifical damnation would most impress 
Mr. Hoover. The late W. Murray Crane, whom I 
have heard described at Mr. Roosevelt's dinner 
table as "the Uriah Heap of the RepubHcan party," 
was the emissary who would advise Mr. Hoover to 
confess the error of his ways and seek the absolu- 
tion of Penrose. A diary kept at Republican 
National Headquarters in New York reveals the 
visits there at the time the plan was made of Mr. 
Crane and others who took part in the enterprise. 
Mr. Penrose got up from a sick bed and thimdered: 
under no circumstances would he permit the 
nomination of Mr. Hoover. 

The plot succeeded. In a few days, Mr. Hoover 
declared that he would not take the Democratic 
nomination. The Democrats dropped him. The 
public was bewildered by his finding out that he 

ii8 



HERBERT HOOVER 

was a Republican after saying that he could not tell 
whether he was one or not until he had seen the 
Republican candidate and the platform. 

At the Chicago Convention he received the sup- 
port of Mr. Crane, Governor Miller, of New York, 
and, on the last ballot, of William Allen White, 
who having voted for Harding on the just previous 
ballot, said he wanted to "leave the bandwagon 
and ride with the undertaker." 

This guilelessness of Mr. Hoover in politics will 
prevent him from realizing his larger ambitions; 
but is a source of strength to him in his present 
position, with American business men who have 
learned to distrust politicians. At any rate, he is 
no politician; he thinks as business men think; his 
interests are their interests ; and when he comes to 
them bearing gifts, — the aid and cooperation of the 
United States Government in their efforts to win 
foreign trade, — they do not take him for a Greek. 

He possesses great special knowledge which they 
desire: he knows much about economics and en- 
joys the advantage of believing that he knows all ; 
he has immense prestige, as a result of all the ad- 
vertising he received during the War; they come to 
Washington and sit at his feet like children; he 
gives them fatherly lectures, even upon the morals 

119 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

of their business, which must be clean, to enter this 
foreign trade of his, with the Government behind it. 
They make mental resolutions of reform . To no poli- 
tician, to no one, even with an instinct for politics, 
would they listen as they listen to him. He speaks 
to American business with immense authority. 
His selection is an example of that unusual in- 
stinct for putting the right man in the right place 
which President Harding has, when he chooses to 
exercise it. 

The post was disappointing to Mr. Hoover; but 
it was the one in which he will be most useful. Not 
a lawyer, he would hardly have done for Secretary 
of State, in spite of his exceptional knowledge of 
foreign conditions. Not a banker, he lacked the 
technical equipment for Secretary of the Treasury. 
Not a politician, he should have, and he has a place 
in which there are the least possible politics. Mr. 
Harding denatured him politically by giving him 
the one business department in the Cabinet. Even 
Hiram Johnson may come no longer to hate him. 

For his present task, besides his special 
knowledge, his remarkable industry, his tireless 
application to details, he has one great gift, his 
extraordinary talent for publicity. There is no 
one in Washington, not even Mr. Hughes, who 

120 



HERBERT HOOVER 

knows so well as he does how to advertise what he 
is doing. 

As business recovers and foreign trade develops, 
the magazine pages will blossom with articles about 
what American enterprise is achieving in foreign 
lands, about the cooperation between American 
business and the American government, and, once 
more, about Mr. Hoover. Finding markets for 
American wares all over the earth will be made a 
romance only second in interest to the feeding of 
Belgium. 

It was not an accident that he was better ad- 
vertised than any general, admiral, or statesman 
of the War. It was not all due to the good will of 
the public, to the work which he did in Belgium 
and in this country, nor to the extraordinary press 
agents whose services he was able to command 
because of that good will. Back of it all was his 
own instinct for publicity, his sense of what in- 
terests the people, his assiduous cultivation of 
editors and reporters. He has magazine and news- 
paper contacts only exceeded by those of Roose- 
velt in his time, and a sense of the power of 
publicity only exceeded by Roosevelt's. 

When he was threatening to win the Democratic 
nomination for the Presidency in spite of the fact 

121 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

that he was not a Democrat, a supporter of 
McAdoo complained bitterly to me, "Confound 
him! He has a genius for self -advertising. He is 
not half the man McAdoo is. He hasn't McAdoo's 
courage, optimism, force, or general statesmanship ; 
but he has this infernal talent for getting himself 
in the papers. There is not much to him but press 
agenting; but how can you beat that?" 

But though his own name has come to count 
for more than the causes he represents, so that 
the best way to obtain aid is to ask for it with 
"Hoover" in big letters and with the suffering 
children of Central Europe in small letters, still he 
remains only a name to the American people. 
They know that he always wears a blue suit of 
clothes cut on an invariable model, which he 
adopted years ago. They know that he worked his 
way through college as a waiter. They know that 
he grew rich as a mining engineer in the East. 
That is all. They think of him as a symbol of 
efficiency, as one who may save their money, as 
one who may find markets for them and develop 
their trade, as one who may help che world upon 
its feet again after the War, as a superman, if you 
will ; but not as a man, not as a human being. 

All his advertising has made him appeal to the 

122 



HERBERT HOOVER 

American imagination, but not to the American 
heart. He is a sort of efficiency engineer, installing 
his charts and his systems into public life, — and who 
loves an efficiency engineer? There are no stories 
about him which give him a place in the popular 
breast. It is impossible to interest yourself in 
Hoover as Hoover ; in Hoover as the man who did 
this, or the man who did that, or the man who will 
do this or that, yes, — but not in Hoover, the 
person. 

The reason is that he has little personality. On 
close contact, he is disappointing, without charm, 
given to silence, as if he had nothing for ordinary 
human relations which had no profitable bearing 
on the task in hand. His conversation is applied 
efficiency engineering; there is no lost motion, 
though it is lost motion which is the delight of life. 
At dinner, he inclines to bury his face in his plate 
tmtil the talk reaches some subject important to 
him, when he explodes a few facts, and is once more 
silent. 

Had he a personality with his instinct for public- 
ity, he would be another Roosevelt. But he is 
a bare expert. 

I doubt if he really thinks of human beings as 
human beings; on the contrary, some engineering 

123 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

graph represents humanity in his mind. It is 
characteristic of him that he always speaks of the 
reUef of starving populations not in terms of 
himian suffering, but in terms of chemistry. The 
people, of whatever coimtry he may be feeding, 
have so many calories now, last month they had so 
many calories; if they had ten calories more, they 
could maintain existence. Many times have I 
heard this formula. It is a weakness in a de- 
mocracy to think of people in terms of graphs, and 
their welfare in terms of calories; that is, if you 
hope to be President of that democracy — ^not if 
you are content to be its excellent Secretary of 
Commerce. 

When he came to Washington as a Food Ad- 
ministrator, he brought with him an old associate, 
a professor from California. A few days later the 
professor's wife arrived and went to live at the 
same house where Mr. Hoover and her husband 
resided. Mr. Hoover knew her well. She and 
her husband had long been his friends. He met 
her in the hall, shook hands with her, welcomed 
her and then lapsed into silence. After some 
moments, he said, "Well, — " and hesitated. 

" Mr. Hoover," she said, "I know you are a busy 
man. You don't have to stand here trying to 

124 



HERBERT HOOVER 

think of something to say to me. I know you well 
enough not to be offended if you don't talk to me 
at all while I am here." 

He laughed and took her at her word. He had 
the habit of too great relevancy to be human. If 
he could have said more than "Well" to that 
woman, he might have been President. 



125 




Harris and Ewirg 



HENRY CABOT LODGE 



HENRY CABOT LODGE 

When Henry Cabot Lodge was elected to Con- 
gress thirty-four years ago there were no portents 
in the heavens, but there was rejoicing in his native 
city of Boston and in many other places. It was 
hailed as the dawn of a new era. Young, he was 
only thirty-seven, well educated, a teacher of 
history, and with six serious books to his credit, he 
was a new figure in politics; Providence, moving 
in its mysterious way, had designed him to redeem 
politics from its baseness and set a shining example. 

Everything was in his favor; he was not only 
learned, so learned, in fact, that he was promptly 
dubbed the "scholar in politics," but he was rich, 
and therefore immune from all sordid temptation ; 
he was a gentleman. Mr. Lodge's forbears had been 
respectable tradesmen who knew how to make 
money and to keep it — and the latter trait is strongly 
developed in their senatorial descendant. From 
them he inherited a f ortime ; he had been educated 
9 129 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

in a select private school and then gone through 
Harvard, whence he emerged with an LL.B. and 
a Ph.D. attached to his name. By all the estab- 
lished canons he was a "gentleman" as well as a 
scholar. In the intervals between teaching and 
writing he had found time to be admitted to the 
Boston bar. 

With that equipment it could be safely pre- 
dicted Mr. Lodge would go far. He has. To-day 
he is the leader of the Republican party in the 
Senate of the United States. 

He early justified the promise. While still a 
Congressional freshman he drafted and introduced 
into the House the "Force Bill," which came to a 
violent death in the Senate. That Bill was not 
only a prophecy but it is a resume of Mr. Lodge's 
career. It is partisanship gone mad. 

On the pretense that it was intended to secure fair 
elections in the South, but actually, as described 
by a member of the House at the time, to prevent 
elections being held in several districts, it placed 
the election machinery in the control of the Federal 
Government, which, through the Chief Super- 
visor of Elections, to be appointed by the Presi- 
dent, and his Praetorian Guard of Deputy Marshals, 
would have controlled every election and returned 

130 



HENRY CABOT LODGE 

an overwhelming Republican majority from the 
Southern States. 

The Bill was typical of Mr. Lodge and the way 
he plays poHtics. The Force Bill would probably 
have ended ingloriously the poHtical career of any 
other man, but Mr. Lodge had the luck of being a 
gentleman born in Boston. Boston is slow to forget. 
A quarter of a century after the Civil War, Boston 
still remembered that conflict, its heart still bled 
for the negro deprived of his vote; and a Boston 
gentleman could do no wrong — to the Democratic 
Party. 

The House amused Mr. Lodge, but it was too 
promiscuous for a person of his delicate sensibili- 
ties who shrank from intimate contact with the 
tineducated and the socially unwashed. Henry 
Cabot Lodge always creates the impression that it 
is a condescension on his part to God to have 
allowed Him to create a world which is not ex- 
clusively possessed by the Cabots and the Lodges 
and their connections. 

All that is only an unfortunate manner. He is 
really the friend of the people, abominating 
snobbishness and aristocratic pretensions; in his 
younger days, when he was campaigning for Con- 
gress, he was known to have slapped a constituent 

131 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

on the back and called him familiarly by his first 
name ; even now, although he has long ceased to be 
a politician and has been canonized as a statesman, 
the old impulses are strong in him. When the 
time draws near for his reelection to the Senate, 
he goes back to Massachusetts, there to take part 
with the common people in their simple pleasures, 
and affably to extend a cold and clammy hand to 
voters, who still venerate him as a scholar in 
politics and a gentleman. So it will be easily 
imderstood why one of Mr. Lodge's temperament 
should early have cast his covetous eye on the 
Senate, and at the first opportunity moved over to 
that more select atmosphere, which he did in 1893. 
When Senator Lodge entered public life the 
flagrant spoils system was rampant. A little band 
of earnest men was fighting to reform the civil 
service so as to make it a permanent establishment 
with merit and fitness the tests for appointment 
instead of political influence. It was a cause nat- 
urally to appeal to the "best people" of Boston, 
and Mr. Lodge, being one of them, having inflex- 
ible principles and a high code of honor, threw 
himself eagerly into the reform movement and 
became its apostle. His principles were so stem 
and unyielding, he demanded such an exalted 

132 



HENRY CABOT LODGE 

standard of private and public morality, that, al- 
though he worshipped the Republican Party with 
a devotion ahnost as great as the memory of that 
grandfather who laid the foundation of the family 
fortunes, with a sorely stricken heart he was com- 
pelled to differ with Mr. Blaine and to flirt 
with those Ruperts of American politics, the 
Mugwumps. 

"The man who sets up as being much better 
than his age is always to be suspected," says a 
historian, "and Cato is perhaps the best specimen 
of the rugged hypocrite that history can produce. " 
As a simmiary of the character of Cato, this is 
admirable, but no one would call Mr. Lodge 
"rugged." 

Mr. Lodge's principles, it has been observed, 
are inflexible and rest on solid foimdation, but like 
good steel they can bend without breaking. An 
ardent civil service reformer, a champion of public 
morality, so long as offices were being awarded to 
the faithful, he saw no reason why he should be 
the victim of his own self denying ordinance. 
Early in his career he became a very successful 
purveyor of patronage, developing a 'keen scent for 
vacant places or a post filled by a Democrat. As 
a theoretical civil service reformer Mr. Lodge left 

133 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

nothing to be desired; as a practical spoilsman he 
had few equals. A Senator's usefulness to his 
friends is much greater than that of a member of 
the House, and if a Senator works his pull for all 
that it is worth he can accomplish much. Mr. 
Lodge was not idle. 

With his grandfathers and his fortune Mr. Lodge 
inherited a violent and bitter dislike of England. 
Probably no man — not even the most extreme 
Irish agitator — is more responsible for the feeling 
existing against England than Mr. Lodge ; because 
the outspoken Irish agitator is known for what he 
is and treated accordingly; carrying out Mr. 
Roosevelt's thought, he will be execrated by decent 
people; but Mr. Lodge, posing as the impartial 
historian and the patriotic statesman, is applauded. 

Just as Mr. Lodge gained a certain fame when he 
was a member of the House from the Force Bill, 
which his own party repudiated, so he signalized 
his admission into the Senate by proposing to force 
England to adopt free silver. It was an oppor- 
tunity to strike at England in a vital spot; it was 
as statesmanlike and patriotic as his attempt to 
deprive the South of their representatives. 

Mr. Cleveland was fighting with splendid 
courage to save the coimtry from free silver, caring 

134 



HENRY CABOT LODGE 

nothing for politics and animated solely by the 
highest and most disinterested motives, and Mr. 
Lodge was thinking only of his spite. President 
Cleveland, said a Boston paper, deserved and had 
the right to expect Mr. Lodge's support, instead of 
which "we find our junior Senator introducing a 
legislative proposition intended to appeal at once 
to the anti-British prejudices of a good many 
Americans, and to the desire of the then preponder- 
ating sentiment of the coimtry to force a silver 
currency upon the American people. It was an 
effort to strike at England." 

Mr. Lodge proposed that all imports from Great 
Britain or her colonies should pay duties double 
those of the regular rates, and any article on the 
free Hst should be made dutiable at thirty-five per 
cent; these additional and discriminating duties 
were to remain in force imtil Great Britain as- 
sented to and took part in an international agree- 
ment "for the coinage and use of silver." 

Mr. Lodge's free silver amendment shared the 
same tomb with his Force Bill; in the Senate fortu- 
nately there were men with broader vision and 
less passion. 

In his biography in the Congressional Directory 
(written by himself) and in the numerous biogra- 

135 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

phies and sketches which have been pubHshed with 
such frequency (Mr. Lodge has a weakness for 
seeing himself in print) curiously enough no men- 
tion can be foimd either of the Force Bill or the 
attempt to coerce England with a silver club. One 
can only explain this reticence by excessive 
modesty. 

Two years later Mr. Lodge deserted his silver 
allies and was as enthusiastic in support of the 
gold standard as he had previously been zealous 
for the purification of the civil service. A Boston 
paper said that he "was made to realize, by the 
influences brought to bear upon him, that he must 
advocate the gold standard or else provoke the 
active hostility of the prominent business men of 
this State." That perhaps is as infamous as any- 
thing ever written. That any influences, even 
those "of the prominent business men of Massa- 
chusetts," could cause Mr. Lodge to swerve from 
his convictions no one will believe. He must have 
had convictions when he sought to drive England 
to a silver standard, he must have been convinced 
that it was for the good of the United States as 
well as the whole world, he must have satisfied 
himself, for Mr. Lodge never permits his emotions 
to control his intelligence, that his action was wise 

136 



HENRY CABOT LODGE 

and patriotic. But although Mr. Lodge will not 
surrender his convictions he has no scruples about 
consistency. 

Mr. Lodge's principles are so stem that he re- 
fused to consent to Colombia being paid for the 
territory seized by President Roosevelt. Mr. 
Lodge made a report (this was when Mr. Wilson 
was President, and I mention it merely as an 
historical fact) in which he denounced Colombia's 
claim as blackmail, resented it as an insult to the 
memory of Mr. Roosevelt, and delared in approved 
copybook fashion (being fond of platitudes), that 
friendship between nations cannot be bought. 
Later (this was when Mr. Harding was President, 
and I mention it merely as an historical fact) as 
Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, 
he brought in a report urging the ratification of the 
treaty, and discovered that Mr. Roosevelt had 
really been in favor of the treaty, expimged the 
impleasant word blackmail from his lexicon, and 
sapiently observed, so impossible is it for him not 
to indulge in platitudes, that sometimes a nation 
has to pay more for a thing than it is really worth ; 
a reflection that would have done credit to the 
oracular wisdom of Captain Jack Bimsby. 

Mr. Lodge attacked the treaty of peace with 

137 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

Germany while it was still in process of negotia- 
tion and severely criticized Mr. Wilson for not hav- 
ing consulted the Senate. That the Senate has 
no right to ask about the details of a treaty before 
the President sends it in for ratification is a con- 
stitutional axiom which Mr. Lodge, with his cus- 
tomary mental infidelity, caressed at one time and 
spumed at another. 

When the treaty with Spain was before the 
Senate (that was when Mr. McKinley was Presi- 
dent, and I mention it merely as an historical fact) 
it was attacked by some of the Democrats. To 
silence these criticisms Mr. Lodge said, "We have 
no possible right to break suddenly into the middle 
of a negotiation and demand from the President 
what instructions he has given to his representa- 
tives. That part of treaty making is no concern 
of ours." 

The Democrats attempted to defeat the ratifica- 
tion of the treaty, and if that was done, said Mr. 
Lodge, "we repudiate the President and his action 
before the whole world, and the repudiation of the 
President in such a matter as this is, to my mind, 
the humiliation of the United States in the eyes of 
the civilized world . ' ' The President could not be sent 
back to say to Spain "with bated breath" (even in 

138 



HENRY CABOT LODGE 

his most solemn moments Mr. Lodge cannot resist 
the commonplace) "we believe we have been too 
victorious and that you have yielded us too much 
and that I am very sorry that I took the Philippines 
from you." 

But that was precisely what Mr. Lodge de- 
manded should and must be done when Mr. Wilson 
brought back the peace treaty. Inconsistency, as 
I have before remarked, Mr. Lodge cares nothing 
about, but his patriotism and partisanship are so 
inextricably intertwined that it is always difficult 
to discover whether in his loftiest flights it is the 
patriot who pleads or the partisan who intrigues. 

Thus, in the debate on the Spanish treaty, Mr. 
Lodge delivered himself of these noble sentiments : 
"I have ideals and beliefs which pertain to the 
living present, and a faith in the future of my 
country. I believe in the American people as they 
are to-day and in the civilization they have 
created," and many more beautiful words to the 
same effect. It was the language of a statesman 
with aspirations and convictions. It sounded 
splendidly. Mr. Lodge is a classical scholar, and 
one wonders whether he remembers his Epictetus : 
"But you utter yoiir elegant words only from your 
lips ; for this reason they are without strength and 

139 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

dead, and it is nauseous to listen to your exhorta- 
tions and your miserable virtue; which is talked 
of everywhere." 

It was the late Senator Wolcott, one of the most 
brilliant orators of his day, who explained why 
Mr. Lodge's oratory left men cold. Wolcott was 
commenting on a speech delivered by Lodge a few 
days earlier and someone said to him that men 
listened to Lodge with eyes undimmed. 

"To bring tears from an audience," said Wol- 
cott, "the speaker must feel tears here (and he 
pointed to his throat), but Lodge can speak for an 
hour with nothing but saliva in his throat." 

Mr. Lodge's dislike of Mr. Wilson was almost 
malignant. Rumor ascribes it to professional 
jealousy. Before Mr. Wilson came into promi- 
nence Mr. Lodge was the only scholar in politics, 
but Mr. Wilson was so far his superior in erudi- 
tion, especially in Mr. Lodge's chosen profession of 
history, that he resented being deprived of his 
monopoly. Perhaps there is another reason. Mr. 
Lodge has cherished two ambitions, neither of 
which has been gratified. The Presidency has 
been the ignis fatuus he has pursued ; he was the 
residuary legatee of Mr. Roosevelt's bankrupt 
political estate in 1916, it will be recalled; last year, 

140 



HENRY CABOT LODGE 

after his fight on the treaty, he considered himself 
the logical candidate and believed he had the 
nomination in his grasp. He has longed to be 
Secretary of State, and it was a bitter disappoint- 
ment when Mr. Harding did not invite him to 
enter the Cabinet. 

Mr. Lodge is a curious and not uninteresting 
study in psychology. He has no great talent, but 
he is not without some ability ; in his youth he was 
an industrious plodder and fond of study. He has 
read much but absorbed little ; he is well educated 
in the narrow sense of the schoolmaster, but he has 
no philosophic background; his is the parasitic 
mind that sucks sustenance from the brains of 
others and gives nothing in return. He is without 
the slightest imagination and is devoid of all sense 
of himior; and without these two, imagination, 
which is the gift of the poet, and humor, which is 
the dower of the philosopher, no man can see life 
whole. 

He has genius almost for misunderstanding pub- 
lic sentiment. To him may be applied Jimius' 
characterization of the Duke of Grafton: " It is not 
that you do wrong by design, but that you should 
never do right by mistake." 

With all these defects, the defects of heritage 

141 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

and environment and temperament, so much was 
expected from Mr. Lodge, and so much he might 
have done, that it is a disappointment he has ac- 
compHshed so Httle. He has been thirty-four years 
in Congress, and his career can be summed up in 
three achievements — the Force Bill, the attempt 
to wreck England by driving her to silver coinage, 
and the part he took in defeating the treaty of 
peace with Germany. The Force Bill and the 
silver amendment his biographers have charitably 
forgotten ; will the future biographer deal as gently 
with the closing years of his life? And if so, what 
material will the biographer have? 

Macaulay, reviewing Barere's Memoirs — and 
allowing for the difference in time and manners 
and morals there is a strange similarity between 
the leader of the French Revolution and the leader 
of the Senate — said, "We now propose to do him, 
by the blessing of God, full and signal justice." 

We think we may say, with proper humility, 
that, by the blessing of God, we have done Senator 
Henry Cabot Lodge full and signal justice. 



142 




Harris and Ewing 



BERNARD MANNCS BARUCH 



BERNARD N. BARUCH 

A CLEVER woman magazine writer once asked 
Bernard N. Baruch for some information about the 
peace treaty. The question was not in his special 
field, the economic sections of the treaty, and he 
told her so. 

"It took him one sentence to say that he could 
not tell me what I wanted to know, " she described 
the interview afterward. "And then he talked to 
me for two hours about himself. He told me of his 
start in life as a three-dollar-a-week clerk, how rich 
he was, his philosophy of life; how you should 
recognize defeat when it was coming, accept it 
before it was complete and overwhelming and start 
out afresh, how liberal and advanced were his 
social views, how with all his wealth he was ready 
to accept a capital tax as perhaps the best way out 
of the bog in which the war had left the world, how 
democratic he was in his relations with his em- 
ployees and his servants. It all seemed as amazing 
10 145 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

to him as if he were describing someone else, or as 
if it had just happened the day before." 

Perhaps it is only to women and to journalists 
that men talk so frankly about themselves, to the 
most romantic and best trained listening sex and 
profession, who perforce survey the heights from 
below. But this young woman's experience was, 
I have reason to believe, a common one. 

Is it vanity? You say that a man who talks so 
much about himself must be vain. To conclude 
that he is vain is not to imderstand Mr. Baruch. 
Is a child vain when it brings some little childish 
accomplishment, some infantile drawing on paper, 
and delightedly and frankly marvels at what he has 
done? It is given to children and to the naive 
openly to wonder at themselves without vanity, 
with a deep underlying sense of humility, and in 
Mr. Baruch's case the unaffected delight in himself 
proceeds from real humility. 

After twenty-five years in the jimgle of Wall 
Street, there is — contradictions multiply in his 
case — much of the child about Mr. Baruch, simple, 
trustful — outside of Wall Street, — incapable of 
concealment, — outside of Wall Street — of that 
which art has taught the rest of us to conceal. His 
himiility makes him wonder; his naivete makes him 

146 



BERNARD N. BARUCH 

talk quite frankly, tinrestrained by the conventions 
that balk others. After all, is not wondering at 
yoiirself a sign of humility? A vain man, become 
great by luck, by force of circimistances, by the 
possession of gifts which he does not himself fully 
understand, would still take himself for granted. 
He would not be a romance to himself, but a solid, 
imassailable fact. 

For Baruch the great romance is Baruch, the 
astonishing plaything of fate, who started life as a 
three-dollar-a-week broker's clerk; made millions, 
lost millions, made millions again, lost millions 
again; finally, still young, quit Wall Street with a 
fortune that left the game of the market dull and 
commonplace, seeking a new occupation for his 
energies ; became during the war next to the Presi- 
dent, the most powerful man in Washington; 
emerged from the war, which wrecked most reputa- 
tions, with a large measure of credit, prepared by 
the amazing past for an equally amazing future. 
A career like that makes it impossible for the man 
who knows it best not to expect anything. Why 
not the " Disraeli of America? " — a phrase he once, 
rather confidentially, employed concerning his 
anticipated future. 

Did you ever see a portrait bust smiling, not 

147 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

softly with the eyes or with a slight relaxation of 
the mouth, but firmly, definitely, lastingly smiling, 
with some inward source of satisfaction? Look at 
Jo Davidson's bust of Baruch, among the famous 
men at the Peace Conference. 

I once saw the various sketches in clay that went 
to the making of that portrait — the subject was 
proving elusive to the sculptor. There were two 
obvious traits to be represented; the unusual knot 
in the brow between the eyes and the smile, with- 
out which it was evident that you had not Baruch. 
The extraordinary concentration in the forehead 
was easy enough to transfer to clay; but the smile 
kept defying the artist. When a smile was traced 
in the clay it softened the face out of character, 
destroyed that intensity which the central massing 
of the brow denoted; and when the smile was de- 
leted the face lost all its brilliance, became merely 
intense, concentrated, racial, acquisitive perhaps, 
clearly not Mr. Baruch's face. Ultimately the 
sculptor succeeded in wedding a smile to that brow, 
and the bust went on exhibition with those of Wil- 
son, Foch, House, Clemenceau, and the others; but 
the imion was never more than a compromise, a 
marriage of convenience for the artist. 

That smile is as inevitable a part of Baruch as his 

148 



BERNARD N. BARUCH 

engaging naivete in talking about himself. It is 
always there, brilliant, unrelated to circximstances. 
It does not spring from a sense of htmior, — Mr. 
Baruch, like the rest of the successful, has not a 
marked sense of humor; a sense of the irony of fate 
he has, perhaps, but not more. It does not denote 
gaiety, nor sympathy, nor satire; it is not kind nor 
yet unkind; it does not relax the features, which 
remain tense as ever even when smiling ; it suggests 
satisfaction, self-confidence, and a secret inner 
source of contentment. It is with Mr. Baruch when 
he is tired, or ought to be tired; the romance of 
Baruch is an internal spring of refreshment. It 
does not leave him when he is angry, if he is ever 
angry ; the romance of Baruch diverts him. Though 
always there, it is not a fixed smile, a mask, some- 
thing worn for the undoing of Wall Street; it is a 
real smile. Somewhere subconsciously there abides 
the picture of the poor clerk become amazingly 
rich, of power in Washington, of a beckoning future 
with possibilities as extraordinary as the wonders of 
the past. Life is not logical, dull, commonplace, a 
tissue of cause and effect; it proceeds delightfully 
by daily miracles. The American Disraeli is no 
further away to-day than was the Baruch of to-day 
from the Baruch of yesterday. Enough to account 

149 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

for a smile in marble, bronze, or in whatever metal 
the htiman face is made of. 

Take the miracle of the "War Administration. It 
was not vanity but humility, the kind of himiihty 
that would have saved Wilson, that served Mr. 
Baruch there. He came to Washington out of Wall 
Street and Wall Street is always anathema. More 
than that he came out of that part of Wall Street 
which is beyond the pale; he did not belong to the 
right monied set there; which is to be anathema 
with that part of the commimity to which Wall 
Street itself is not anathema; moreover he had been 
unjustly accused in connection with the famous 
Wall Street "leak." And he entered an adminis- 
tration which was the center of much prejudice and 
hatred. Yet he was modest enough, however, to 
assimie that his personality did not count, that it 
was the work to be done which mattered, and that 
he could depend upon the friendliness both of the 
Republicans and of the great industrial interests 
of the country to that work if it should be properly 
done. 

The belief Mr. Wilson has and a much lesser 
man, Hiram Johnson, has, that men are thinking 
exclusively about them personally and not about 
the causes they advocate or the measures they 

150 



BERNARD N. BARUCH 

propose is a more dangerous form of vanity than 
the habit of admiring oneself audibly. It requires 
collossal egotism to imagine the existence of many 
enemies and Mr. Baruch is genuinely himible in 
the matter of enmity. After watching him during 
the war, in an administration which was enemy 
mad, I fancy he counts his genuine foes on the 
fingers of one hand. Moreover he was quite im- 
personal about his task. He did not do everything 
himself on the theory that no one else was quite 
big enough to do it. There is no practical snobbism 
about him. His knowledge of the industries of the 
coimtry was that of the speculator; it was not that 
of the practical industrialist, and he knew it. 

He surrounded himself with the best men he 
could find. He trusted them implicitly, his habit 
being not to distrust men imtil he finds that they 
can be trusted but to trust them unless he finds 
that they cannot be trusted — also a modest and 
naive trait. He was never tired of praising Legg, 
Replogle, Somers, and the other business men whom 
he brought to Washington, praising himself, of 
course, for his skill in choosing them — he never 
achieves self-forgetfulness — but giving them full 
credit for the work of the War Industries Board. 
And he inspired an extraordinary loyalty among his 

151 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

associates, big and little. He treated the Republi- 
cans as he treated big business as if all had only one 
interest, above politics and personalities, and that 
was to win the war. And when President Wilson, 
in response to Republican criticism of the war 
organization, gave him real power to mobilize 
American industry, the Republicans applauded the 
bestowal of authority as constructive and took 
credit to themselves for accomplishing it. 

Baruch and Hoover, alone of the business men 
who came to Washington during the war achieved 
real successes in the higher positions, and he 
showed vastly the greater capacity of the two to 
operate in a political atmosphere. A man who was 
nothing but a Wall Street speculator, not an indus- 
trial organizer, organized successfully the biggest 
industrial combination the world has ever seen; a 
man who was suspect of American business got on 
admirably with American business, and a man who 
had not been in politics accomplished the impossi- 
ble task of adjusting himself to work under political 
conditions. It is another chapter in the romance 
of Baruch. 

He cannot explain it, so why should not he 
wonder about it quite openly and quite delightedly, 
with all his engaging naivete? That inability to 

15^ 



BERNARD N. BARUCH 

explain anything is one of the characteristics of Mr. 
Banich. When you begin to apprehend it you 
begin to see why he is a romance to himself. He 
cannot explain himself to himself, nor to anyone 
else, no matter how much he tries. And even more, 
he cannot explain his opinions, his conclusions, his 
decisions to anyone in the world with all the words 
at his command. He can never give reasons. 
Mentally nature has left him, after a manner, 
incommunicado. His mind does not proceed as 
other men's minds do. 

The author of the Mirrors of Downing Street 
describes Lord Northcliffe's mind as "discontinu- 
ous." If I had never talked to Lord Northcliffe I 
should be led to suppose that his mind resembled 
Mr. Baruch's. But the British journahst's mental 
operations are a model of order and continuity 
compared to those of the former American War 
Industries Chairman. Like the heroes of the an- 
cient poems Mr. Baruch's mind has the faculty of 
invisibility. You see it here ; a moment later you 
see it there, and for the life of you cannot tell how 
it got from here to there, a gift of incalculability 
which must have been of great service in Wall 
Street, but which does not promote understanding 
nor commimication. And the more Mr. Baruch 

153 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

tries to give you the connecting links between Jiere 
and there the worse off you are, both of you. 

The ordinary mind is logical and is confined 
within the three dimensions of the syllogism. You 
watch it readily enough shut in its little cage whose 
walls are the major premise, the minor premise, and 
the conclusion. There is no escape as we say, from 
the conclusion. There is no escape anj^where. 

But Mr. Baruch's mind escapes easily. It pos- 
sesses the secret of some fourth mental dimension, 
known only to the naive and the illogical, or per- 
haps supralogical. He has brilliant intuitions, 
hunches, premonitions, the acute perceptions of 
some two or three extra senses that have been bred 
or schooled out of other men. 

Perhaps he is like Lloyd George, who is not 
logical but achieves his successes through two or 
three senses which ordinary men have not ; however, 
unlike Lloyd George, he cannot simulate logic and, 
after jumping to his conclusions, reduce them to 
the understanding of the three-dimensional mind. 
It is a grief to him that he cannot ; for if he could 
make a speech, that is to say, translate himself, 
that figure of Disraeli would, he thinks, be less 
remote. But when your mental operations are a 
succession of miracles, you may have brilliant in- 

154 



BERNARD N. BARUCH 

tuitions and extraordinary prevision about the 
mineral supplies necessary to win the war, — which 
he had — you may have wonder, like the naive and 
the poets, about that extraordinary thing yourself, 
or about that still more extraordinary thing which 
is life or destiny, but you cannot move the 
masses. 

Still there are compensations . A perfectly logical 
mind would have explained all the wonder away, 
reduced the miracle of personality to a stolid opera- 
tion of cause and effect, quite self-approbatively 
no doubt, and made Mr. Baruch talk of himself as 
the rest of the great do, modestly, after this 
fashion: "Behold me! I am what I am because 
when I was nine years old I saved nine cents and 
resolved then and there always to save as many 
cents each year as I was years old. Young man, 
save!'' 

There is no fun in being not a wonder but a copy 
book. And a perfectly logical mind would flirt 
with Disraeli warily. It would say, "One does not 
at fifty change from business to politics with suc- 
cess. Disraeli didn't start out in Wall Street. As 
the Germans say, 'what will become vinegar sours 
early.'" 

Mr. Baruch slips easily through the three sides 

155 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

of this reasoning. Life is not logical. Fate is not 
logical. He is not logical. 

He has had his taste of public life under Wilson 
and he wants more. I venture to say that he would 
give every one of his many millions and be as poor, 
well, poorer than any member of the present 
cabinet, to be in the place Mr. Hughes occupies 
to-day. 

Everyone who knows him has heard him say 
that when he entered office he resolved to quit 
business because he learned so much as head of 
the War Industries Board that it would be im- 
proper for him ever to go into the market again. 
There is more to it than that ; public life has given 
him a profound distaste for mere money-making. 
He wrote to Senator Kenyon the other day that he 
had not made a dollar since he went to work for the 
government. I believe that to be true for I have 
found him an extraordinarily truthful and honest 
man. He has that desire for public distinction 
which is so often characteristic of his race. He has 
the idealism, a characteristic also of the race which 
gave to the world two great religions. He has the 
same passion for public service now that he once 
had for the market. And he belongs to a race, 
which, in spite of all our national catholicity on the 

156 



BERNARD N. BARUCH 

subject of races, has never yet produced its Dis- 
raeli in America, and to a party out of power, 
perhaps for a long time, and he spent his youth 
learning a trade which is not the trade he would 
follow now. 

All of this accounts for his restlessness. He is 
still youthful and has enormous energies and no 
occupation for them. He loves personal publicity 
and has an instinct for it, not so keen as Hoover's or 
Will H. Hays', but still keen. 

Whither shall he turn? To the organization of 
his party? There he may buy the right to be 
lampooned and in the end, if his party succeeds, to 
be introduced into the Cabinet apologetically, as 
Hays and Daugherty were, on the plea that the 
President must appoint a number of party workers. 
To the Senate? It is a body which affords escape 
from the boredom of small town life for men who 
have grown rich on the frontier or in the dull 
Middle West. It carries with it an excuse to live in 
Washington, some social position there, and a title 
envied in Marion, Reno, Butte, or Salt Lake City. 
Senators who start young serve long and obediently, 
suppressing all their natural instincts for self- 
expression, and attain if they are lucky the scant 
distinction of a committee chairmanship in a legis- 

157 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

laturethat has steadily tended toward submergence. 
To the House? Individuals are lost in the House. 
And the Presidency comes to few, and by chance. 

Knowing his ambition for public distinction and 
his wealth, men go to him every day to sell him the 
road to power and influence, and, if you will, public 
service. Let him have the Democratic organiza- 
tion on condition of paying its debts and financing 
its activities. One faction of the Democratic party 
recently sought control, spreading the understand- 
ing that Mr. Baruch would, in the event of its suc- 
cess, open wide his pocket book. After the meeting 
of the National Committee at which this faction 
met its defeat I said to a prominent member of the 
victorious group: "Now that you have won you 
will probably get Baruch's money. He is restless, 
eager to find an outlet for his energies, less in- 
terested in any personality than in his party. 
Hang on and wait and he must come to you." 

"Do you know," he replied, lowering his voice 
confidentially, "That is just the way I diagnose it." 

And at this very time the Republicans, hearing 
much of Mr. Baruch's money and its use to build 
up such an intensive organization for the Demo- 
crats, as Chairman Hays with a million or two at 
his disposal had erected for them, considered 

158 



BERNARD N. BARUCH 

seriously whether or not it would not be wise them- 
selves to occupy Mr. Baruch's energies and divert 
his ambitions away from party organization. They 
debated putting Mr. Baruch on the commission to 
reorganize the executive departments of the govern- 
ment. All had their eyes on the same ambition 
and the same wealth ! 

Several daily newspapers in New York, and I 
know not how many magazines and weeklies, have 
been offered at one time or another to Mr. Baruch, 
for it is known that one of his ideas of public service 
is to own and edit a great liberal journal, a "Man- 
chester Guardian" of America. But an oppor- 
timity to buy a newspaper in New York is an oppor- 
tunity to invest $3,000,000 or $4,000,000, to lose 
$500,000 or more for several years thereafter and 
to become the national figtire that Mr. Ochs is, or 
Mr. Reid is, or Mr. Mimsey is, certainly something 
far short of the American Disraeli or even the 
Baruch of the War Industries Board. 

Mr. Baruch, you will observe, has no vulgar 
illusions about what money will buy. He likes 
money. It brings with it a certain personal en- 
largement. It adds to the romance of himself in 
his own eyes, as well as in the eyes of others. It 
procures the flattering ears of journalists, and a 

159 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

place on front pages, and, if one inclines toward 
ostentation, even the ownership of a newspaper 
itself. 

But money will not buy a commanding place in 
public life. And even if it would buy such a place 
he would not be content to do other than earn one. 
He wants to repeat the thrills of his youth in the 
market, in the thrills of a second youth in Wash- 
ington. He is incurably romantic. 

To sum him all up in a sentence — he has an 
extraordinary sense of wonder and an unequalled 
sense of reality, the sense of wonder directed to- 
ward himself, the sense of reality directed largely 
but not exclusively elsewhere. 



i6o 




U. and U 



ELIHU ROOT 



ELIHU ROOT 

Elihu Root might have been so much publicly 
and has been so little that a moral must hang some- 
where upon his public career. 

He might have been many things. He might 
have been President of the United States if his 
party ever could have been persuaded to nominate 
him. He might have been one of the great Chief 
Justices of the Supreme Court if a President could 
have been persuaded to appoint him. He might 
have given to the United States Senate that weight 
and influence which have disappeared from it, if 
he had had a passion for public service. He might 
have been Secretary of State in the most momen- 
tous period of American foreign relations if a cer- 
tain homely instinct in Mr. Harding had not led 
him to prefer the less brilliant Mr. Hughes. He 
might have made history. But he has not. Out of 
his eight years in the Cabinet and six years in the 
Senate nothing constructive came that will give his 

163 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

name a larger place in history than that of Rnfus 
Choate, another remarkable advocate who was 
once Attorney General. 

Distrust has always barred his way, distrust of a 
mind and character to which problems appear as 
exercises in ingenuity rather than questions of 
right and justice. His greatest opportunity for 
constructive statesmanship was offered in the 
making of the New York State constitution. But 
when it became known that Mr. Root had domi- 
nated the Constitutional Convention, that the pro- 
posed constitution was Mr. Root's constitution, 
that was enough; the voters rejected it in the 
referendum. 

Distrust spoiled the mission to Russia during the 
war. The Russians distrusted him while he was 
with them. President Wilson distrusted his report 
when he returned. And Mr. Wilson's successor 
equally distrusted him when he chose a man to 
finish the work which Mr. Wilson had badly done 
or to correct the work that Mr. Wilson had left 
imdone at Paris. 

Light on President Harding's attitude toward 
Mr. Root is thrown by an incident at Marion 
during the campaign. The Republican candidate 
had made his speech of August 28 th in which he 

164 



ELIHU ROOT 

indicated his views upon the League of Nations. 
Two days later a newspaper arrived in Marion 
containing a dispatch from abroad where Mr. Root 
then was, at work upon the international court. 

The correspondent represented Mr. Root as 
"amazed" at the position Mr. Harding had taken. 

The candidate came to the headquarters early 
that morning. One of the headquarters attaches 
handed him a copy of the paper. Mr. Harding 
read the dispatch and was angry. 

"That man Root," he exclaimed, "has done 
more harm to the Republican party than any other 
man in it ! He is always pursuing some end of his 
own or of some outside interest . ' ' He started away ; 
then turned back, still angry, and added: "You 
remember the Panama Canal tolls incident. That 
was an example of the kind of trouble he has always 
been making for the party." 

Many reasons have been given why the President 
passed over the obvious man for Secretary of State. 
Mr. Root himself, who would have taken the place 
gladly as an opportunity for his extremely keen 
intelligence, but who did not seek it, thinks that the 
Senate, flushed with its recent victory over Mr. 
Wilson and desiring itself to dominate foreign re- 
lations, conspired to prevent his choice. The 

165 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

Senators did oppose Mr. Root, but their lack of 
influence with the President has been sufficiently 
exposed by events. 

The real obstacle to Mr. Root's appointment 
was Mr. Harding's distrust of him-, the instinctive 
feeling of a simple direct nature against a mind too 
quick, too clever, too adroit, too invisible in many 
of its operations. Mr. Harding, being common- 
place himself, likes a more commonplace kind of 
greatness than Mr. Root's. Those who were close 
to him said the President feared that Mr. Root 
would "put something over on him." A certain 
moral quality in Mr. Hughes outweighed Mr. 
Root's special experience and wider reputation. 

Mr. Roosevelt used to tell a story boastfully of 
his own practicality which throws much light on 
Mr. Root and upon the reason for Mr. Root's com- 
parative failure as a public man. 

"When I took Panama, " he would say, "I found 
all the members of my Cabinet helpful except one. 
Mr. Root readily found numerous precedents. 
Mr. Taft was sympathetic and gave every assist- 
ance possible. Mr. Knox alone was silent. At 
last I turned to him in the Cabinet meeting and I 
said, 'I should like to hear from the Attorney 
General on the legality of what we are doing.' Mr. 

1 66 



ELIHU ROOT 

Knox looked up and said, ' Mr. President, if I were 
you I should not have the slightest taint of legality 
about the whole affair.' " 

Such was Mr. Root. Public questions always 
were likely to occur to him first as exercises in 
mental adroitness rather than as moral problems. 
His extremely agile mind finds its chief pleasiire in 
its own agility. Then he was always the advocate, 
always instinctively devoting himself to bolstering 
up another man's cause for him. 

" He is a first class second, " said Senator Penrose, 
objecting to him as a candidate for President at the 
Republican Convention of 191 6, "but he is not his 
own man." 

He is always someone else's mouthpiece and 
publicly he is chiefly remembered as Mr. Roose- 
velt's mouthpiece. When he came to New York 
and made the speech that elected Hughes Governor 
and made possible Hughes as Secretary of State 
he said, "I speak for the President." He equally 
spoke for the President when he delivered that 
other remembered address, warning the States that 
imless they mended their ways the Federal Govern- 
ment wotdd absorb their vitality. 
^ The law is a parasitic profession and Mr. Root's 
public career is parasitic. He lacks originality, he 

167 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

lacks passion — there is no p.ace for passion in that 
clear mind — he lacks force.l He elucidates other 
men's ideas, works out or puts into effect their 
policies, presents their case, is, by temperament, by 
reason of gifts amounting almost to genius, of de- 
fects that go with those gifts always and every- 
where, the lawyer. His public career has been 
controlled by this circimistance, 

I doubt if he ever had a real love of public life. 
He turned to it late, after he had made his success 
in the profession of his choice, and he carried over 
into it the habits of the law. He always seemed 
to be taking cases for the public. He took a case 
for Mr. McKinley as Secretary of War because the 
War Department needed reorganization and the 
case promised to be interesting. He took a case 
for Mr. Roosevelt as Secretary of State because 
Mr. Roosevelt was the most interesting client in 
the world. He took a case for New York State, to 
remodel its constitution, a case that ended dis- 
astrously. He took a case for Mr. Wilson in Russia 
and another, the League of Nations, to form its 
international court for it. He was willing to take a 
case for Mr. Harding to make a going concern of the 
world for him following the smash-up of the war, 
something like the task of counsel of a receiver- 

i68 



ELIHU ROOT 

ship, the most interesting receivership of all 
time. 

For a few years Mr. Roosevelt made public life 
interesting to Mr. Root who, it looked then, might 
devote the rest of his career to national affairs. 

It was a sparkling period for America. We have 
never had an "age" in the history of this country 
like the age of Elizabeth or the age of Louis XIV, 
or the age of Lorenzo, the Magnificent; time is too 
short and democracy too rigid for such splendors; 
but the nearest equivalent to one was the "age," 
let us call it that, of Theodore Roosevelt. There 
was the central figure — an age must have a central 
figure — a buoyant personality with a Renaissance 
zest for life, and a Renaissance curiosity about all 
things known, and unknown, and a boundless ca- 
pacity for vitalizing everyone and everything with 
which he came in contact. 

Dull moments were unknown. Knighthood was 
once more in flower, wearing frock coats and high 
hats and reading all about itself in the daily press. 
Lances were tilted at malefactors of great wealth, 
in jousts where few were imhorsed and no blood 
spilled. Fair maidens of popular rights were res- 
cued; great deeds of valor done. Legends were 
created, the legend of Leonard Wood, somewhat 

169 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

damaged in the last campaign, the legend of the 
Term's Cabinet, with its Garfields and its Pinchots, 
now to be read about only in the black letter books 
of the early twentieth century, and the legend of 
Elihu Root, still supported in a measure by the 
evidences of his highly acute intelligence, but still 
like everjrthing else of those bright days, largely a 
legend. 

Roosevelt, the Magnificent, made men great with 
a word, and his words were many. His great were 
many likewise, great statesmen, great public 
servants, great writers, great magazine editors, 
great cowboys from the West, great saints and 
great sinners, great combinations of wealth and 
great laws to curb them; everything in scale and 
that a great scale. Mr. Root acquired his taste for 
public life in that "age" just as Mr. Hoover, Mr. 
Baruch and a dozen others did theirs in the moving 
period of the Great War. It is easy to understand 

how. 

Like all remarkable ages this age was preceded 
by discoveries. The United States had just fought 
a war which had ended in a great victory, over 
Spain. The American people were elated by their 
achievement, ^.ware of their greatness, talked much 
and surely of "destiny, " the period in Washington 

170 



ELIHU ROOT 

being but a reflection of their own mood. Their 
mental horizon had been immensely widened by 
the possession, gained in the war, of some islands 
in the Pacific whose existence we had never heard 
of before. 

Until that time there had been for us only two 
nations in the world, the United States and Eng- 
land, the country with which we had fought two 
wars, and innumerable national campaigns. His- 
torically there had of course been another country 
as friendly as England had sometimes been inimi- 
cal, France, but France had ceased to be a nation 
and became a succession of revolutions. 

Manila Bay had been a series of revelations, 
besides teaching us that Philippines is spelled with 
two "ps" and only one "1." We had there dis- 
covered Germany, a country whose admirals had 
bad sea manners. We knew at once that our next 
war would be with Germany, although the day 
before Dewey said, "You may fire when you are 
ready, Gridley, " we would as soon have thought 
that our next war would be with Patagonia. 

There too we had an interesting and surprising 
experience with England, hitherto known chiefly 
for her constant designs on the national dinner pail. 
She behaved in striking and pleasing contrast with 

171 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

Germany. Blood, on that bright day, May i, 
1898, began to be thicker than water. Learning 
once more had come out of the East. From Manila 
Bay flowed such a tide of new ideas, such a reassess- 
ment of old conceptions as had not visited the 
world since the discovery of Greek and Latin 
letters put an end to the Middle Ages. 

Perceiving our widened interest, John Hay, as 
Secretary of State, took our foreign relations on a 
grand Cook's tour of the world. He showed us 
Eiirope and the Orient. In honor of Manila Bay 
he invented that brilHant fiction, the "open door" 
in the East. Turning our attention to the world 
we discovered the General Staff. Hitherto our 
army had fought mostly with the scattered Indian 
tribes of the West and you cannot use a General 
Staff in conducting six separate wars at once, each 
no bigger than a good-sized riot. But as Admiral 
Perry had opened the eyes of the Hermit Kingdom 
of Japan, so Admiral whatever-his-name-was who 
consented to be simk by Dewey, the unremembered 
hero of this great enlightenment, had opened the 
eyes of this Hermit Republic of the West to the 
world across the seas. 

We had to have a General Staff. Mr. Root, as 
Secretary of War, gave us one, faithfully copied 

172 



ELIHU ROOT 

from the best European models. Roosevelt, the 
Magnificent, stood by and said "Bully." Every- 
thing was of this order ; so it was to a tremendously 
interesting job that Mr. Root succeeded when he 
took the place of John Hay as Secretary of State. 
The mood of the hour was expansive and a limii- 
nous personality pervaded the national life. 

But public service cannot always be so interest- 
ing as it is at its fullest moments. The luminous 
personality went out. And Mr. Root's next ex- 
perience, in the United States Senate, was dis- 
illusioning. 

The Senate is a body in which you grow old, un- 
gracefully waiting for dead men's shoes. The 
infinite capacity for taking pains which Senators 
have is not genius. If the gods have been good to 
you, as they were to Henry Cabot Lodge, you enter 
the upper house young, a scholar and idealist, with 
the hope of the Presidency as the reward of gener- 
ous service. Where the race is to the slow you lay 
aside your winged gifts one by one and your ambi- 
tion centers finally not on the Presidency but on 
some committee chairmanship cltmg to by a per- 
tinacious octogenarian. 

Hope deferred makes you avaricious of little 
favors, until when a British journalist writes of 

173 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

you as one did of Henry Cabot Lodge, making his 
speech before the last Republican national conven- 
tion at Chicago, that you "looked like an elderly 
peer addressing a labor gathering," your cup of 
happiness, is full to the brim, as Henry Cabot 
Lodge's was, — whether because you are compared 
to a lord or because other people, lesser than Sena- 
tors, are put into their proper inferior place. Mr. 
Lodge is the perfect flower of the Senate. It is a 
flower that does not bloom in a night. It is almost 
a century plant. 

Into this Senate came Mr. Root, full stature, as 
he might walk into the Supreme Court of the 
United States, preceded by his reputation. On 
Olympus one may spring full grown like Minerva 
from the head of Jove. But not in the Senate, 
where strong prejudice exists against any kind of 
cerebral generation. A young Senator from Ohio, 
Mr. Harding, arrived in the upper House early 
enough to see the portent of Mr. Root there. He 
keeps to this day a sense of its unbecomingness. 

From his desk on the floor Mr. Root talked to 
the country, but the Senate did not listen. One 
does not speak in the Senate by the authority of 
intellect or of personality. One speaks by the 
authority of dead men's shoes. 

174 



ELIHU ROOT 

Not being a big committee chairman, Mr. Root 
was not of counsel in the big cases. He tried to 
associate himself with counsel but the traditions 
of the Senate and the jealousy of Senators were 
against him. He had not the passion for public 
service that makes Reed Smoot and Wesley Jones 
miraculously patient with the endless details of 
legislation. After six years he quit. 

"I am tired of it, " he said to Senator Fall, "the 
Senate is doing such little things in such a little 
way." It was different from public life under 
Roosevelt where one did not notice size of what 
they did — one has not yet noticed the size of 
what they did — for the grandeur of the way they 
did it. 

I have said that Mr. Root's mind with its ad- 
vocate's bent always occupied itself with the justi- 
fication of other men's views, his chief's or his 
party's. There was one notable exception, his 
break with the Republicans while he was in the 
Senate on the question of discriminating in favor 
of American shipping through the Panama Canal. 
A clever lawyer's argument can be made that when 
the United States said "all nations" in its treaty 
with Great Britain regarding the Canal it meant all 
nations except itself. But Mr. Root declined to 

175 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

make it, holding that plain morality and a greater 
respect for the obligations of a treaty than Beth- 
man Hollweg expressed when he called them scraps 
of paper required this country to charge just the 
same tolls for American ships using the canal as 
for British ships or any other ships using it. 

The general Republican argument is that thus 
interpreted, the Hay-Pauncefote treaty is so foolish 
and so inconvenient a treaty that Mr. Hay must 
not have meant what he said when he wrote it, and 
really did mean something that he wholly failed to 
say. The reasons for contending that Mr. Hay 
meant no tolls for the United States and tolls for 
England, when he wrote the same tolls for every- 
body are highly ingenious and as it was a Democratic 
President who was asserting that Mr. Hay used 
language in its ordinary sense, Mr. Root as a Re- 
publican might have been expected to declare that 
Mr. Hay used it in quite the reverse of its ordinary 
sense. But he did not. He supported the Demo- 
cratic President and treated the Republican posi- 
tion as if it had not the slightest taint of legality 
in it, to the lasting shock of Mr. Harding, on whose 
side the precedents are, for nations do say "all 
nations, " and are later found to mean all nations 
but themselves when their virtuous promises to 

176 



ELIHU ROOT 

make no exceptions in their own favor turn out to 
be inconvenient. 

When Mr. Root took a high moral stand on the 
treaty it was said among RepubHcan Senators that 
he was thinking more of the transcontinental rail- 
roads which were fighting competition by water 
than he was of the sanctity of international engage- 
ments. The probability is that he was probably 
thinking more of John Hay and Elihu Root than 
he was of either. He was in the Cabinet when John 
Hay as Secretary of State made the treaty. Sena- 
tor Lodge, the only other Senator to agree with Mr. 
Root and disagree with his party about the mean- 
ing of all nations, was John Hay's closest friend. 
Probably both of them, intimately associated with 
Mr. Hay, had their part in the making of the 
treaty. They had perhaps the sensitiveness of 
authors about their capacity to say exactly what 
they meant. They wanted to recognize their own 
international piece when it was put on the stage 
by the commercially minded producers of the 
Senate. 

The history of the Hay-Pauncefote treaty is 
interesting and unfamiliar. Attaching Paunce- 
fote's name to the treaty was a delicate act of in- 
ternational courtesy since there is Pauncefote's 

12 177 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

word for it, privately spoken, that he had nothing 
to do with the writing of it. 

Hay draughted the treaty by himself probably 
with the cognizance of Root and Lodge, the great 
lawyer who was his associate in the Cabinet and his 
closest personal friend in the Capitol. Hay then 
handed it to Pauncefote, the British minister here. 
Paimcefote transmitted it to the foreign office in 
London which received it with surprise and prob- 
ably with satisfaction, for the Clayton-Bulwer 
treaty which it in a sense revived, had been for- 
gotten for nearly half a century. Delay is the rule 
of foreign offices. 

Perhaps Mr. Hay's treaty was not so generous 
as it seemed on first reading, a suspicion which 
seems to have been justified by the interpretation 
put upon it by the final authority upon inter- 
national engagements, the Republican National 
Convention at Chicago. And if it was as generous 
as it seemed let not America think Great Britain 
too eager in accepting it, let America pay a little to 
overcome the reluctance of Great Britain in setting 
her approval upon the new contract. 

At last, after much apparent hesitation, the 
foreign office agreed to the new treaty in considera- 
tion of America's throwing in with it an arbitra- 

178 



ELIHU ROOT 

tion of the Bering Sea dispute. President Roose- 
velt interpreted Mr. Hay's arbitration contract 
much as the Republican National Convention 
interpreted Mr. Hay's treaty, by appointing Ameri- 
can arbitrators who promised beforehand, in giving 
a fair and impartial hearing to the Canadian claims, 
always to vote for the American position and to 
resign and be succeeded by others if they foimd 
that they could not do so. 

Why, then, the prevailing distrust of Mr. Root? 

His public morals regarding the Hay-Pauncefote 
treaty were better than those of his party, even if 
we accept the view that they were dictated by 
nothing more than a certain mental integrity, a 
certain consistency with himself. He was as vir- 
tuous in the taking of the Panama Canal as the 
virtuous Mr. Roosevelt. He had the advocate's 
honesty of being true to his client, whether his 
client was the public or the great corporations. 
Mentality was uppermost in him, so that he took 
primarily a logical rather than a moral view of all 
questions ; but also so much that he could not pre- 
tend, could not act, and thus he was more honest 
than the politicians. 

His statesmanship was discontinuous, being an 
interesting avocation rather than a career. Of it 

179 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

little has been permanent. His General Staff soon 
lapsed into incompetence; if it had not, it might 
have been the danger to American national life 
that the German General Staff was to German 
national life. Recently it was merged with the 
high command. As Secretary of State he was not 
creative, Mr. Harding turning back to the solid 
ground of American international policy, rested 
upon John Hay's open door and Knox's dollar 
diplomacy. Root in foreign relations merely 
succeeded with the Senate where Hay had failed. 
Always the advocate, he takes other men's ideas, 
Hay's or Wilson's and justifies them or makes them 
practical. His New York constitution failed, being 
unjustly suspected. His world court has little 
better hope of acceptance, for Mr. Hughes is not a 
voluntary sharer of glory. 

In spite of it all, some greatness remains, the 
impression of a powerful though limited intelli- 
gence. His career was to give us a moral. It is: 
if you have an adroit and energetic mind you will 
find public affairs uninteresting; except in their 
occasional phases. If you have such a mind and 
must enter politics, hide it; otherwise democracy 
will distrust you. Whatever you do, be dull. 



1 80 




Harris and Ewing 



HIRAM WARREN JOHNSON 



HIRAM JOHNSON 

Hiram Johnson wotdd have enjoyed the French 
Revolution, if accident had made him radical at 
that time. He woiild have been stirred by the 
rising of the people; he would have given tongue 
to their grievances in a voice keyed to lash them to 
greater fury. He would have been excited by it 
as he never has been by the little risings of the 
masses which he has made vocal. In all the noisy 
early phases of it, he would have made the loudest 
noise. And he would have gone to the block when 
the real business of the revolution began with the 
fanatics at its helm. 

In the Russian Revolution, he would have been 
a Kerensky; and he would have fled when the true 
believers in charge arrived. He is the orator of 
emeutes, who is fascinated by a multitude in a 
passion. 

Johnson is not a revolutionary. Not in the least, 
not any more than Henry Cabot Lodge is. But 

183 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

revolution has a fierce attraction for him. He once 
said to me, speaking bitterly during the campaign, 
of Mr. Harding's prospective election, "The war 
has set back the people for a generation. They 
have bowed to a hundred repressed acts. They 
have become slaves to the government. They are 
frightened at the excesses in Russia. They are 
docile; and they will not recover from being so for 
many years. The interests which control the 
Republican party will make the most of their 
docility. In the end, of course, there will be a 
revolution, but it will not come in my time." 

That "it will not come in my time" was said in a 
tone of regret. It was not so much that the Sena- 
tor wanted revolution. I do not believe he did. 
But he wanted his chance, that outburst of popular 
resentment which would bring him to the front, 
with the excitement, the sense of power that would 
come from the response of the nation when his 
angry voice translated into words its elemental 
passion. 

Turbulent popular feeling is breath in Johnson's 
nostrils. Twice he has thoroughly enjoyed its 
intoxication. 

His political life was blank paper when the tu- 
mult of popular indignation swept California at 

184 



HIRAM JOHNSON 

the time Francis J. Heney, who was prosecuting 
the San Francisco grafters, was shot in the court 
room. He had thought nothing poHtically, he had 
felt nothing poHtically. He had neither convic- 
tions, nor passions, nor morals, politically speaking. 
He grew up in soil which does not produce lofty 
standards. Something of the mining-camp spirit 
still hung over California, which had been settled 
by adventiu"ers, forty-niners, gold seekers, men who 
had left the East to "make a new start" where 
there was pay dirt. The State had a wild zest for 
life which was untrammeled by Puritanism. San 
Francisco had its Barbary Coast and in every 
restaurant its private dining rooms for women. 
Johnson himself was sprung from a father who was 
a "railroad lawyer, " the agent of privileges in pro- 
curing special favors, by methods once well known, 
from the state legislature. The atmosphere of his 
youth was not one to develop a sensitive conscience 
or a high conception of public morals. 

Johnson at this time was a practicing attorney, 
not noted for the quality of his community service. 
The administration of San Francisco had been a 
scandal for years. Few cared. It was a "corrupt 
and contented" city. The corruption grew worse. 
Lower and meaner grafters rose to take the place 

185 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

of the earlier and more robust good fellows who 
trafficked in the city o' shame. Graft lost class, and 
lost caste. It was ultimately exposed in all its 
shocking indecency. The light and licentious town 
developed a conscience. Public indignation arose 
and reached its height, when the grafters ventured 
too far in the shooting of the attorney charged 
with their prosecution. 

Johnson then felt for the first time something he 
had never felt before — the stirring of the storm of 
angry popular feeling. It woke something in him, 
something that he did not know existed before — 
his instinct for the expression of public passion; 
his love of the platform with yelling multitudes in 
front of him. 

He threw himself into the fray on the side of 
civic virtue. The disturbance to the complacency 
of San Francisco disturbed the complacency of the 
State, which had calmly endured misgovemment 
for many years. Misgovemment procured by the 
railroad, the public utility corporations, the other 
combinations of wealth, through their agents, 
and through the corrupt politicians. Johnson 
became the spokesman of public protest and the 
reform governor of the State. 

After that came battling for the Lord at Ar- 

i86 



HIRAM JOHNSON 

mageddon — the most intoxicating experience in 
American political history, for a man of Johnson's 
temperament. It was a revolution, not in a govern- 
ment, but in a party. Bonds were loosed. Im- 
mense personal enlargement came to those who had 
known the ties of regularity. It was an hour of 
freedom, unbridled political passion, unrestrained 
political utterance. Docility did not exist. Vast 
crowds thrilled with new hopes yelled themselves 
hoarse over angry words. 

Association with Roosevelt on the Progressive 
ticket lifted Johnson from a local to a national 
importance. The whole country was the audience 
which leaped at his words. It was a revolution in 
tittle, a taste, a sample of what the real thing would 
be, with its breaking of restraints, its making of the 
mob a perfect instrument to play upon, its unleash- 
ing of passion to which to give tongue. Johnson 
has felt its wild stimulation and like a man who has 
used drugs the habit is upon him. 

Moreover, his one chance lies that way. I have 
said that he is, by accident, radical. Let us im- 
agine a great outburst of popvdar passion for re- 
action. And suppose that Johnson was, when it 
arrived, a political blank, as he was when Heney 
was shot. Johnson would have raised his angry 

187 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

voice against radicalism, just as readily as 
for it. 

The essential thing with him is popular passion, 
not a political philosophy. He has no political 
philosophy. He has no real convictions. He does 
not reason or think deeply. His mentality is slight. 
He is the voice of many; instinctively he gives 
tongue to what the many feel ; that is all. 

Suppose the strong-lunged Califomian were a 
political blank, just reaching the national con- 
sciousness, when the reaction against Wilson began 
and when the public swung to conservatism. 

You know those vast tin amplifiers employed 
in big convention halls, or in out-door meetings, to 
carry the voice of the speaker to the remotest 
depths of the audience; Johnson is a vast tin am- 
plifier of the voice of the mass. When the people 
had become "docile" he would have thundered 
"docility" to the uttermost bounds of the uni- 
verse, if he had not by earlier utterances been 
definitely placed on the side opposed to docility. 

But he had been definitely placed in the battle of 
Armageddon. A thousand ennuies located him 
for all political time. No convictions hold him 
where he is in case there be profit in changing sides ; 
other men habitually conservative would have the 

i88 



HIRAM JOHNSON 

preference over him on the other side. In this sense 
he is accidently radical, accidently because he 
happened to emerge in poHtics at a radical moment. 
That takes into account only the mental back- 
ground of his political position . There is an element 
that was not chance. PubUc passion is almost 
invariably radical, springing as it does from the 
resentment of inequality, and Johnson is the tongue 
of public passion. 

Is he dangerous? He is, only if public passion 
becomes dangerous and only up to the point where 
the speakers of revolution pass from the stage and 
the doers of it rig up their chopping blocks. At 
present he furnishes the words, the ugly words, 
which men throw instead of stones at the objects 
of their hate. He is the safety valve of gathering 
passion. Men Hsten to him and feel that they have 
done something to vindicate their rights. They 
applaud him to shake the roof, and vote for Mr. 
Harding. 

It is customary to speak of his magnetism over 
crowds. He has no magnetism in personal contact. 
He walks toward you as if he were about to deliver 
a blow, an impression that is strengthened by his 
square menacing figure. His voice is unpleasant. 
His smile is wry. He not unusually has a com- 

189 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

plaint to make against the public, against the press, 
against fate, against you personally. He is not 
interested in people, as Roosevelt was to so an 
amazing degree, and as magnetic persons usually 
are. He is cold, hard, and selfish. His quarrels are 
numerous, with the campaign managers of the 
Armageddon fight, with his own campaign manager 
of 1920, with the newspaper correspondents. He is 
habitually pessimistic, and pessimism and mag- 
netism do not go together. 

His complaint that the people were docile and 
would not recover their confidence and self-asser- 
tion in his time, was a bit of his inevitable gloom. 
His dark habit of thought hung over his campaign 
for the presidential nomination of 1920, preventing 
his making a real effort in many states, and lay in 
the way of his success. He has few friends, love 
having been left out of his make-up. I do not 
speak of family affection — but love in its larger 
implications. Those who surround him — clerks 
and secretaries — have the air of repressed, starving 
personalities. 

That which gathers the crowds and sets them 
shouting is not his magnetism but the perfect 
expression of their passion. For them and for it he 
is a sounding board. His voice with its hard angry 

190 



HIRAM JOHNSON 

tone, its mechanical rise and fall, has the ring of a 
hundred guillotines in operation. Having little 
culture, unintellectual, he is primitive as the mass 
before him. He talks their language and an in- 
stinct all his own gives him an exact sense of their 
emotions. 

And what he says leaves the impression of tre- 
mendous sincerity. His sincerity does not arise 
from reasoned convictions but from hatred; deep 
and abiding hatred. 

Senator Borah once said, "The difference be- 
tween Johnson and me is that I regard questions 
from the point of view of principles while he re- 
gards them from the point of view of personalities. 
When a man opposes me I do not become angry at 
him. On the next issue he may agree with me. 
When a man opposes Johnson he hates him. He 
feels that the opposition is directed personally 
against him, not against the policy that separates 
them." 

Johnson's opponents are the elements of reaction, 
the malefactors of great wealth, the supporters of 
that social inequality which the crowd resents . They 
stood in his path in California. They made impos- 
sible his nomination at Chicago. When the bitter 
enders, during the treaty fight, planned to send him 

191 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

on a tour of the country, these monied men 
closed their pocketbooks, exclaiming to Senator 
Knox, "What do you mean to do? Advertise this 
man Johnson and make him the Republican candi- 
date for President? Not with our money." 

Only the raising of a fund by Senator McCormick 
and some of the old Progressives, gave him his 
chance to speak. He hates them and when he 
attacks them it is with all the force and sincerity 
of his soul. It is no mere question of hatred, such as 
Roosevelt would employ to dramatize and make 
personal the issues he was representing to the 
people; it is bitter, revengeful detestation. It 
makes Johnson the most sincere man before the 
country to-day. And that pessimistic strain in his 
nature causes the darkness of his diatribe to seem 
all the more true. 

But he swallows for expediency as other men 
swallow their convictions for it, and wrath is the 
bitterer dose. During the 1920 campaign he 
trafficked with Senator Penrose, the representative 
of hated wealth, for support at Chicago, offering, 
it has not been disclosed what considerations, for 
his aid. 

He was ready at that time to take back his 
speech advocating the government ownership of 

192 



HIRAM JOHNSON 

railroads, a gesture against "the interests," made 
at the bidding of Hearst, at the beck of whose 
agents he is prone to bestir himself. 

It must be an irksome livery, that of Hearst, for 
he hates all service and overshadowing. Equally 
irksome is his service to regularity under the rod 
of the Republican party. But he bows to it, and 
supports Harding whom he hates. He bobs up like 
a Jack-in-the-box and makes his laudatory speech 
whenever the name of Roosevelt comes up, though 
in his heart he must reverence none too deeply that 
overshadowing personality. 

He has no roots except in the mob and no hope 
except in its aroused resentment against inequality. 
Not being interested in individuals he has not that 
personal organization possessed by Roosevelt, with 
his army of correspondents, friends and idolators, 
in every hamlet. 

And of course he has little hope of ever con- 
trolling his party organization. He is curiously 
alone. 

"There are only three men in the world whom I 
trust, " he once said to a friend. There is no reason 
to regard this as an exaggeration. His attitude 
toward his associates in the Senate is this: "If I 
were crossing a desert with any one of them and 
13 193 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

there was only one water bottle, I should insist 
upon carrying that bottle." 

On such pessimism and distrust it is impossible 
to build political success. It can come only when 
his pessimism and distrust coincide with like 
pessimism and distrust in the masses. He waits the 
day, but gloomily, without confidence. 



194 




Harris and Ewing 



PHILANDER CHASE KNOX 



PHILANDER CHASE KNOX 

"I LIKE Knox and I admire him tremendously, 
but I will not ask him to be my Secretary of State. 
He is too indifferent." 

This characterization of the junior Senator from 
Pennsylvania, attributed to his late colleague 
President Harding, summarizes very aptly his 
strength and his weakness. One can very easily 
admire him and, when he drops the mask of dig- 
nity, which seems almost pompous in so diminutive 
a figure, one cannot help liking him. But in spite 
of his successes, — which his enemies attribute to 
luck, and he probably attributes to intellectual 
superiority, — he has never quite achieved greatness 
and will probably go down in history as one of the 
lesser luminaries in the political heavens. 

Knox is indifferent, especially to those who do 
not know him intimately. It is not because he has 
been without ambition. On the contrary he has 
longed to soar like the eagle but he has the wings 

197 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

of the sparrow and whatever exertion he has made 
has ended in a feeble and futile fluttering. 

I doubt if any man in public life has had so many 
honors thrust upon him. He has held three great 
offices of the Republic without so much as raising a 
hand for any of them. Unlike most men he did 
not travel the mucky road of politics to reach Wash- 
ington nor compromise with circumstance to gain 
distinction. Three Presidents invited him to sit at 
their cabinet tables. Three times the Republican 
machine in Pennsylvania invited him to sit in the 
Senate. With graceful dignity he accepted all of 
these invitations not, indeed, unconscious of the 
fact that the selection in each case was a very happy 
one. 

I do not mean by this that he is conceited. He is 
merely conscious of the fact that intellectually he is 
somewhat superior to his colleagues, most of whom, 
strangely enough, quite agree with him. They 
consult him and accept his counsel with almost 
childlike faith. To the mediocre politicians and 
provincial lawyers who constitute the bulk of the 
Senate and House of Representatives, he is a figure 
apart, who looks upon their antics with a kindly, 
but never amused, tolerance. 

"I know nothing of politics," he said to me a 

198 



PHILANDER CHASE KNOX 

short time ago. "I have never been interested in 
politics as such." 

This remark is rather enigmatical to the average 
member, who would, ordinarily, look upon the 
author as a dolt or pretender. They do not dare 
to do either in the case of Mr. Knox ; therefore, the 
conclusion that he is indifferent. Never have the 
men associated with Mr. Knox questioned his 
capacity. 

Robert Lansing, when he was Secretary of State, 
said of him; "Senator Lodge will not understand 
the treaty but he will fight for it for political rea- 
sons . Senator Knox will imderstand it thoroughly. ' ' 

The observation seems almost prophetic in the 
light of what has since been disclosed. Mr. Lans- 
ing's faith in Mr. Knox's judgment seems to have 
been fully justified. I know of no one who has held 
more steadfastly the respect of colleagues in the 
Senate or at the Cabinet table, nor who has been 
more easily successful up to a certain point or so 
singularly imsuccessful beyond it. He has done 
valiant service for his coimtry but he has failed 
lamentably to reach the heights from which he 
could look upon broader horizons. 

In the early days of his career no one strove more 
whole heartedly. Destiny smiled upon him and the 

199 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

White House seemed to beckon. He was not un- 
aware of the opportunity nor was there anyone 
more eager to grasp it. But he discovered that he 
could not stir the enthusiasm that begets pohtical 
power. The secret, which enabled many other 
men, many of whom he despised, to succeed, was 
not his. 

A temperamental dislike of the methods of poli- 
ticians was followed by a strong animosity towards 
those who crossed his political path and some of 
those who went along beside it. He became hyper- 
critical of those with whom he associated and 
allowed a natural germ of cynicism to develop and 
flourish within him. Little by little he has with- 
drawn from the active combat, a philosopher in 
politics enamored of public life but unwilling to 
suffer the inconveniences it involves. 

It is no wonder then that his colleagues in the 
Senate, especially the younger members, are some- 
what in fear of the incisive tongue, for he wields it 
frequently and contemptuously. When after his 
election, Mr. Harding went South with Senator 
Frelinghuysen, Senator Davis Elkins, and Senator 
Hale, the older Senators, not, perhaps, without a 
tinge of disappointment at having been left out, 
marveled at the entourage the President had 

200 



PHILANDER CHASE KNOX 

selected for himself, but Knox was cynically un- 
disturbed. 

"It is quite simple," he said, "I see nothing 
mysterious about it at all. The President wants 
relaxation — complete mental relaxation." 

No less biting was his comment on Robert Lans- 
ing when that gentleman started on the high road 
of public service as Counselor of the State Depart- 
ment. The bandy-legged messenger who guards 
the door of the Secretary of State is the negro, 
Eddie Savoy. Eddie, in his way, is a personage. 
For forty years he has ushered diplomatists in and 
out of the Secretary's office; his short bent figiu-e 
gives the only air of permanence to an institution 
which seems to be in a constant state of flux. When 
the Lansing appointment was announced Mr. Knox 
observed: '*I would as soon ask Eddie Savoy an 
opinion on foreign affairs as Robert Lansing." 

The roots of Mr. Knox's superciliousness dip 
down deep into the relationships begun a score of 
years ago. To understand him as he is it is neces- 
sary to understand him as he was when his career 
was before him. William McKinley asked him to 
become Attorney General in his Cabinet. He was 
then forty-two years old, a political nobody. What 
reputation he had was confined to Pittsburg and a 

201 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

selected few of the steel millionaires in Wall Street, 
but among the selected few were names to be con- 
jured with, such as Andrew Carnegie and Henry 
C. Frick. Whether President McKinley's interest 
in Knox was spontaneous or prompted by Mr. 
Frick I do not know. Mr. Knox likes to believe 
that Mr. Frick did not enter into the equation. 
Mr. Knox declined, saying that he coiild not sacri- 
fice his lucrative practice but that in four years he 
would accept the invitation if the President cared 
to renew it. 

It was renewed. At the age of forty-six, Mr. 
Knox quit the bar for politics, or, as he would say, 
statecraft. His appointment evoked a storm of 
protest from such immaculate journals as the New 
York World. They dubbed him, "Frick's man," 
and predicted that the Department of Justice 
would be turned into a Wall Street anteroom for 
the convenience of the capitalistic combinations 
then flouting the Sherman anti-trust law. The 
charges, of course, were as wide of the mark as 
most of the ebullitions of the yellow journals. 

Mr. Knox began his public career by attacking 
the Northern Securities merger, against the judg- 
ment of some of the highest-paid lawyers of the 
coimtry. The Supreme Court sustained him. It 

202 



PHILANDER CHASE KNOX 

was the greatest victory the government ever won 
iinder the Sherman law. Thereafter Mr. Knox, 
who had been labeled a corporation lawyer, was 
proclaimed a trust buster. By the time he was 
fifty he had become the greatest Attorney General 
in a half century. Certainly the mark he set has 
never been reached by any of his successors. 

When Mr. Roosevelt came into the White House 
Mr. Knox was at the pinnacle of his career and was 
as much admired by his new chief as by his 
martyred predecessor. In ability Mr. Roosevelt 
considered him next to Elihu Root, — for which Mr. 
Root was never quite forgiven. It is generally 
known that President Roosevelt believed that Mr. 
Root was the best qualified man in the country to 
succeed him, but at the same time, being an astute 
politician, he knew that he could not be elected. 
His attitude to his Secretary of State was the same 
as Senator Lodge's toward himself, when he said 
in 1920: "I know that I would make an excellent 
President, but I realize that I would make a poor 
candidate." 

Root being out of it because of this obvious 
defect. President Roosevelt proceeded to groom 
Mr. Knox for the nomination. Mr. Knox at the 
President's suggestion, prepared and delivered 

20?, 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

several speeches in the hope that he would awaken 
popular enthusiasm. The attempt failed dismally. 

There was not a responsive throb, not even a 
vague echo. Mr. Knox knew that he possessed not 
the merest shred of the leadership necessary to a 
presidential candidate. 

He went back to the Senate, where he had suc- 
ceeded Matthew Quay upon his resignation from 
the Cabinet, sadder if wiser, while William H. Taft 
draped upon his broad shoulders the mantle of 
Roosevelt. 

Mr. Knox has never quite recovered from that 
disappointment, but he did not altogether abandon 
hope. He accepted a place in the Taft Cabinet as 
Secretary of State, more for the opportunities it 
offered than for the pleasure of the associations, for 
Mr. Knox's attitude toward President Taft was 
never more than passive tolerance tinged with 
contempt. This new venture was no more success- 
ful than the old. He made it quite evident that a 
new regime was to be established in the State 
Department. The policies originated by John Hay 
and developed with singular brilliancy by Mr. Root 
were shunted into the backgroimd and a new era 
was proclaimed. It is unnecessary to comment on 
the dismal essay at "dollar diplomacy" and the 

204 



PHILANDER CHASE KNOX 

Mexican policy of that period. The simple fact 
is that Mr. Knox's name is not associated with a 
single successful foreign policy. Some might have 
succeeded but unfortunately the energy displayed 
at the outset of his career in this new field was soon 
dissipated. Mr. Knox disliked the methods of 
diplomacy. He lacked both the patience and the 
finesse. He went to the Department, over which 
he was supposed to preside, but rarely. For weeks 
at a time Washington saw nothing of him. The 
administration of the Department was left largely 
to Huntington Wilson, whose ineptitude was 
colossal. 

Fortimately for Mr. Knox the extent of his 
failure was somewhat screened from public view 
by the dust and clatter of the collapse of the Taft 
Administration, but it left its mark on him. He 
had failed dismally to eclipse his predecessor, Elihu 
Root. He had eliminated himself from all con- 
sideration as one of the very great statesmen of his 
period. He was a bitterly disappointed man. Not 
only his associates but the members of the diplo- 
matic corps were made to feel the sting of his re- 
sentment against overwhelming circumstances. 
Such references as that directed at the French 
Ambassador, M. Jules Jusserand, now dean of the 

205 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

diplomatic corps, whom he called "the magpie," 
cost him many friends. 

Upon the inauguration of President Wilson Mr. 
Knox slipped quietly away to Valley Forge. Public 
life, however, still had for him its attractions, and 
when Senator Oliver retired, he returned to the 
Senate. During the war his great talents were 
dormant. He merely came and went, a curious 
little detached figure apparently quite imresponsive 
to the emotions which swept the country during 
that eventful period. 

With the signing of the armistice he aroused 
himself from his apparent torpor. Although he was 
quite without feeling during the stress and storm, 
the situation created by the presentation of the 
Treaty of Versailles with its interwoven League of 
Nations stirred his intellectual interest. He be- 
came the leader of the little band of "irreconcil- 
ables " who girded their armor to prevent what they 
regarded as a catastrophic sacrifice of American 
interests. At the same time Mr. Knox narrowly 
missed another opportunity to lift himself con- 
spicuously above the heads of stump speakers who, 
for the most part, to-day comprise the Senate. 

During that memorable fight Senator Lodge 
incurred the enmity at one time or another of every 

206 



PHILANDER CHASE KNOX 

faction in the Senate. He could not be trusted to 
maintain the same position over night, shifting as 
expediency demanded until most of his colleagues, 
particularly the irreconcilables, were exasperated 
beyond endurance. At one of the most critical 
periods Senator Borah appealed to Senator Knox 
to wrest the leadership from the Massachusetts 
Senator, with intimations that he would have the 
support of the "bitter enders" at the forthcoming 
convention at Chicago. Mr. Knox does not love 
Mr. Lodge but he refused to consider the proposal. 
He was indifferent. His last great political oppor- 
tunity went glimmering. 

As I have said Mr. Knox can be very charming 
but I doubt that he sincerely admires any of the 
public men with whom he has been associated, or 
can call any of them, from the purely personal view- 
point, his friends, with the possible exception of 
Andrew Mellon, whom he caused to be appointed 
Secretary of the Treasury. Of course, he likes 
many of his colleagues, after a fashion, especially 
those who admire him, but that is another matter. 
The intimacy usually implied in the term friend- 
ship does not enter into such relations. 

For some of the more important men he has 
known, he has shown a very distinct dislike. It is 

207 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

said of him that he thought President Harding 
overlooked a real opportunity when he failed to 
invite him to become Secretary of State, but his 
disappointment was somewhat mollified by the 
fact that Mr. Root was not asked to take the post. 

Mr. Knox prefers to look upon Mr. Root as a 
lucky lawyer who has taken to himself much of the 
credit of John Hay's great work. He shows an 
even less regard for Mr. Lodge's talents. And he is 
doubtful of Mr. Hughes. 

His attitude towards the Secretary of State dates 
back to the insurance scandals. At that time Mr. 
Frick asked Mr. Knox to make an investigation 
and suggest a course of action to avert a national 
disaster. This Mr. Knox did in his thorough and 
painstaking way. A little later, when Mr. Hughes 
was appointed to make a public inquiry, the Knox 
report was laid before him, and according to the 
author of it, he followed precisely the lines therein 
indicated creating for himself a national reputation 
and laying the foundation of a public career. 
Credit was not given Mr. Knox. It has been 
suggested that the incident might have been an 
illustration of two great minds seeking the same 
channel. Mr. Knox does not think so. 

In spite of his disappointments and failures, the 

208 



PHILANDER CHASE KNOX 

dignified little Senator from Pennsylvania who has 
been so many times on the verge of greatness, 
seems to think that he could have done just a little 
better than any of those who have achieved it, had 
circumstance given him the opportunity. Perhaps 
he might. It is a compliment that few men merit 
to be called merely indifferent. 



14 



209 




Harris and Ewing 



ROBERT LANSING 



ROBERT LANSING 

He who believes in luck should study the career 
of Robert Lansing. Mr. Lansing probably thinks 
that the goddess of chance played him a scurvy 
trick, after having admitted him to the Olympian 
heights, to break him as suddenly as she made him. 

Robert Lansing's real misfortune was not know- 
ing how to play his luck. It is curious the fear 
men have of death. The former Secretary of 
State's only hope of immortality was to commit 
political suicide, and he lacked the courage or the 
vision to fall upon his sword. 

When Woodrow Wilson was elected President 
for the first time he appointed Mr. Bryan Secretary 
of State. The opinion Mr. Wilson entertained of 
Mr. Bryan we all know. Mr. Wilson was not 
given to letting his thoughts run wild, but on one 
occasion, with pen in hand, he permitted himself 
the luxury of saying what he thought and expressed 
the pious hope that somebodv would knock the 

213 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

distinguished Nebraskan into a cocked hat and 
thus dispose of the perpetual candidate who was 
the Old Man of the Sea to the Democratic Party. 

Circumstances alter cases; Mr. Wilson as a 
private citizen could say and think what he pleased ; 
as President he was compelled to make Mr. Bryan 
Secretary of State. As Mr. Bryan knew nothing 
of history and less of European politics and had a 
superb disdain of diplomacy — diplomacy according 
to the tenets of Bryanism being an unholy and 
immoral game in which the foreign players were 
always trying to outmaneuver the virtuous and 
innocent American — ^he was provided with a polit- 
ical nurse, mentor, and guardian in the person 
of John Bassett Moore, who had a long and bril- 
liant career as an international lawyer and diplo- 
matist. Mr. Bryan busied himself with finding 
soft jobs for deserving Democrats, preaching and 
inculcating the virtues of grape juice to the 
diplomatic corps, and concocting plans whereby 
the sword was to be beaten into a typewriter and 
war become a lost art. Meanwhile Mr. Moore 
was doing the serious work of the Department. 

No two men were more unlike than Mr. Bryan 
and Mr. Moore; Mr. Bryan a bundle of loosely 
tied emotions to whom a catchy phrase or an tin- 

214 



ROBERT LANSING 

soirnd theory is more precious than a natural law 
or the wisdom of the philosopher; Mr. Moore an 
intellect who has subordinated his emotions, and 
to whom facts are as important as mathematics 
to an engineer. It was an incompatible union ; it 
cotild not last. Mr. Moore became impatient of 
his chief's vagaries and, about a year later, returned 
to the dignified quiet of Columbia University. 

This was early in 19 14. Now for the random 
way in which chance weaves her skein. Mr. Moore 
went out of the Department and left the office of 
Coimselor vacant, an office, up to that time, so 
little known that the public, if it gave the matter 
any thought, believed its occupant was the legal 
adviser of the Department, while, as a matter of 
fact, he is the Under Secretary, which is now the 
official designation. 

At this stage of his career Mr. Lansing was con- 
nected with the Department as an adviser on 
international affairs and had represented the 
United States in many international arbitrations. 
He was known to a small and select circle of 
lawyers specializing in international law, but to 
the public his name meant nothing. He had 
always been a good Democrat, although he was 
married to the daughter of the late John W. Foster, 

215 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

who wound up a long and brilliant diplomatic 
life as Secretary of State in President Harrison's 
Cabinet after Mr. Blaine's resignation. 

Mr. Lansing had made Washington his home 
for many years, and when the new Democratic 
Administration came into power he believed his 
services to the party entitled him to recognition, 
and he sought the appointment of Third Assistant 
Secretary of State. The Third Assistant Secre- 
tary is the official Social Secretary of the Govern- 
ment. When royalty or other distinguished per- 
sons come to this country as the guests of the 
nation the Third Assistant Secretary is the Master 
of Ceremonies. He has to see that all the forms 
are properly complied with and nothing happens 
to mar the visitors' enjoyment; he sends out in- 
vitations, in the name of the State Department, to 
the funerals of Ambassadors or the inauguration 
of the President. But for some reason Mr. 
Lansing's praiseworthy ambition was defeated. 

Mr. Moore had knowledge, learning, and experi- 
ence, but he was denied the gift of divination. Had 
he known that a few months later a half crazed 
youth in an unheard of place was to be the uncon- 
scious agent to set the whole world aflame, tm- 
doubtedly he would have put up with Mr. Bryan's 

216 



ROBERT LANSING 

curious ideas and peculiar methods and stuck to 
his desk at the State Department, and Mr. Lan- 
sing would never have been heard of. But at the 
turning point in Mr. Moore's career his luck 
deserted him and Mr. Lansing became the benefi- 
ciary. Mr. Lansing, who would have been satisfied 
with the appointment of Third Assistant Secretary 
of State, a minor place in the hierarchy, was 
appointed by Mr. Wilson Counselor of the 
Department of State. 

The appointment created no excitement. In 
March, 19 14, foreign affairs had little interest for 
the American people. There was Mexico, of course, 
and Japan ; there were the usual routine questions 
to form the customary work of the department; 
but the skies were serene; murder, rape, and sud- 
den death no one thought of; Lloyd's, which will 
gamble on anything from the weather to an ocean 
tragedy, would have written a policy at a ridicu- 
lously low premium on the maintenance of the 
peace of Europe; any statesman rash enough to 
have predicted war for the United States within 
three years would have aroused the concern of his 
friends and the professional solicitude of his physi- 
cian. Apparently Mr. Lansing had tumbled into 
an easy and dignified post which would not unduly 

217 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

tax his physical or mental strength. He could 
congratulate himself upon his good fortune. 

A few months later the situation changed. The 
State Department became not only the center 
about which the whole machinery of the Govern- 
ment revolved but on it was focused the attention 
of the country and the thoughts of Europe. The 
Counselor of the Department was lifted out of 
his obscurity ; despatches to the belligerents signed 
"Lansing" were published in the newspapers, 
statements were issued by him, he was interviewed; 
he received Ambassadors, and when an Ambassa- 
dor visited the State Department the nerve centers 
of the whole world were affected. Again, a few 
months later, in June, 19 15, Mr. Bryan kindly 
accommodated Mr. Wilson by knocking himself 
into a cocked hat, and Mr. Lansing was ap- 
pointed Secretary of State. Few men had risen 
so rapidly. He had no reason to complain of his 
luck. 

Mr. Wilson made some extraordinary appoint- 
ments — a close observer has said he could read 
motives but not men — and his appointment of 
Mr. Lansing at a time of crisis would have been 
inexplicable were it not logical as Mr. Wilson 
reasoned. Mr. Wilson did not invite as his asso- 

218 



ROBERT LANSING 

ciates his intellectual equals or those who dared 
to oppose him; it was necessary that the State 
Department should have a titular head, but Mr. 
Wilson was resolved to be his own Secretary of 
State and take into his own hands the control of 
foreign policy. No great man, no man great 
enough to be Secretary of State when the world 
was in upheaval, would have consented to that in- 
dignity; no man jealous of his own self-respect 
could have remained Mr. Wilson's Secretary of 
State for long. A Secretary of State or any other 
member of the Cabinet must of course subordinate 
his judgment to that of the President, for the 
President is the final court of appeal. But Mr. 
Wilson went f lu-ther than that ; he heaped almost 
unparalleled affront upon Mr. Lansing; he made 
the great office of Secretary of State ridiculous, 
and he invested its incimibent with no greater 
authority than that of a copyist. 

Perhaps Mr. Wilson reads men better than his 
critics believed; perhaps Mr. Wilson had fully 
taken the measure of Mr. Lansing and knew how 
far he could go. 

Nature never intended Mr. Lansing to be a 
leader of men, to fight for a great cause, or to en- 
gage in physical or intellectual combat. His life 

219 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

has been too soft for that, and he is natiirally 
indolent. He is fond of, and has more than the 
amateur's appreciation for, music, painting, poetry, 
and the classics of literature. He has dabbled in 
verse, he sketches and he has written, but without 
brilliancy. Accident made him a lawyer, but he 
was really intended to be an artist ; he would have 
produced no masterpiece, for genius is not in him, 
but he would have been happy in his work and per- 
haps have given inspiration to men of greater 
talent. Without being a fanatic or dogmatic, he 
is strongly religious ; religion to him has a meaning 
and is not merely a convention ; he has a code which 
he has always observed and ideals which he has 
preserved; he is charitable in his judgments and 
has never allowed his prejudices to influence his 
actions; he is, to use a word so often misapplied, 
a gentleman, and his motto is Noblesse oblige. 
Typical of the standard he sets for himself was the 
admirable restraint he showed after his abrupt 
dismissal from the Cabinet. He neither sought 
vindication through the newspapers, nor posed as 
a victim, nor soothed his feelings by denuncia- 
tions of the President ; he did not make a nuisance 
of himself by inflicting the recital of his grievances 
upon his friends or hinting darkly at revelations. 

220 



ROBERT LANSING 

He kept quiet and went about his affairs as a 
gentleman should. 

Why, it may be asked, should a man with so 
many fine qualities have cut such a sorry figtire? 
The answer perhaps is that he suffers from the 
defects of his quahties, fine as we must admit them 
to be ; too fine, perhaps, for a coarser world. 

When a weak and somewhat easy-going man, 
immensely pleased with his own exalted position, 
has to deal with a man of iron will, ruthless in his 
methods, he is necessarily at a disadvantage. 
Considering Mr. Lansing's temperamental defects 
and the effect of his training, his failure is no 
myster>\ 

Until Mr. Lansing became Secretar}^ of State he 
had never kno\sTi responsibility. Practically his 
entire life had been spent as a subordinate, carry- 
ing out with zeal and intelligence the tasks assigned 
to him, but always in obedience to a stronger 
mind. Nothing more weakens character or in- 
tellect than for a man habitually to turn to another 
for direction or inspiration ; always to play the part 
of an inferior to a mental superior. For years 
Mr. Lansing had been connected with many inter- 
national arbitrations which, theoretically, was a 
magnificent training for a future Secretary of 

221 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

State, and actually would have destroyed the 
creative and administrative usefulness of a much 
stronger man than Robert Lansing. 

In the whole mummery of international relations 
there is nothing more farcical than an international 
arbitration. It is always preceded by great popu- 
lar excitement. A ship is seized, a boimdary is 
run a few degrees north or south of the conven- 
tional line, something else equally trivial fires the 
patriotic heart. The flag has been insulted, the 
offending nation is a land grabber, national honor 
must be vindicated. Secretaries of State write 
notes, ambassadors are instructed, the press be- 
comes rabid, speeches are made; the public is ad- 
vised to remain calm, but it is also assured there 
will be no surrender. After a few weeks the public 
forgets about the insult or the way in which it has 
been robbed ; but the responsible officials who have 
never allowed themselves to become excited, con- 
tinue the pleasing pastime of writing notes. 

Months, sometimes years, drag on, then a new 
Secretary of State or a Foreign Minister, to clean 
the slate, proposes that the childish business be 
ended by an international arbitration. More 
weeks, more often months, are spent in agreeing 
upon the terms of reference, and finally the dispute 

222 



ROBERT LANSING 

goes before an ' ' impartial arbitral tribunal. ' ' Both 
sides appoint agents and secretaries, an imposing 
array of coimsel, technical experts; and as the 
coimsel are always well paid they have a conscien- 
tious obHgation to earn their fees. 

More months are required to prepare the case, 
which frequently rtms into many printed volumes; 
and the more volumes the better pleased every- 
body is, as size denotes importance. The arbitra- 
tors, although they are governed by principles of 
law, know what is expected of them, and they 
rarely disappoint. Almost invariably their de- 
cision is a compromise, so nicely shaded that while 
neither side can claim victory neither side suffers 
the humiliation of defeat. As by that time both 
nations have long forgotten the original cause of 
the quarrel their people are quite content when 
they are told the decision is in their favor. As 
junior counsel Mr. Lansing's name appears in many 
international arbitrations, and it was precisely 
the work for which he was fitted. 

If Mr. Lansing had been a man of more robust 
fiber, he would have returned his portfolio to Mr. 
Wilson as early as 1916, for the President was writ- 
ing notes to the belligerents and did not, even as 
a perfimctory courtesy, consult his Secretary of 

223 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

State; he made it only too patent he did not con- 
sider his advice worth asking. Mr. Lansing was 
too fond of his official prominence to surrender it 
easily, and that is another curious thing about the 
man. Somewhat vain, holding himself in much 
higher estimation than the world did, few men have 
so thoroughly enjoyed ofhce as he. But he re- 
mained the quiet and unassuming gentleman he 
had always been; and he certainly could not have 
deluded himself into believing that there was a 
still higher office for him to occupy. 

Mr. Lansing could not screw up his courage to 
resign in 191 6. The following year the United 
States was at war and he naturally could not 
desert his post; but in 191 9 Mr. Lansing was given 
another opportunity, and still he was obdurate. 
He has told us in his public confession that he 
tried to persuade the President not to go to Paris. 
Mr. Wilson, as usual, remained unpersuaded, and 
Mr. Lansing hvimbly followed in his train. 

Then, of course, Mr. Lansing could not resign, 
but in Paris he was even more grossly humiliated ; 
he was completely shut out from the President's 
confidence; he wrote letters to Mr. Wilson which 
the President did not deign to answer ; so little did 
Mr. Lansing 'know what was being done that he 

224 



ROBERT LANSING 

sought information from the Chinese Delegates! 
It sounds incredible, it seems even more incredible 
that a Secretary of State should put himself in 
such an undignified position, and having done so 
should invite the world to share his ignominy. But 
he has set it down in his book as if he believed it 
was ample defense, instead of realizing that it is 
condemnation. 

Curious contradictions! One might expect a 
sensitive man, a man who has never courted pub- 
licity, who has none of the genius of the self -ad- 
vertiser, to crave forgetfulness for the Paris 
episode, to shrink from publicly exposing himself 
and his humiliations, but Mr. Lansing seemingly 
revels in his self -dissection. The President slaps 
his face; in his pride he simimons all the world 
to look upon the marks left by the Executive palm. 
He feels the sting, and he enters upon an elabo- 
rate defense to show it is the stigmata of martyr- 
dom. A treaty was framed of which he disap- 
proved, yet he could sign it without wrench of 
conscience. Unreconciled to resignation in Paris, 
he returned to Washington as if nothing had 
happened, again to resume his subservient relations 
to the President. 

Opportimity, we are told, knocks only once at a 
IS 225 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

man's door, but while opportunity thundered at 
Mr. Lansing's portal "his ear was closed with the 
cotton of negligence." 

Early in 1920 Mr. Wilson dismissed him, 
brutally, abruptly, with the petulance of an invalid 
too tired to be fair; for a reason so obviously dis- 
ingenuous that Mr. Lansing had the sympathy of 
the country. He should either have told the truth 
then and there or forever have held his peace; and 
had he remained mute out of the mystery would 
have grown a myth. The fictitious Lansing would 
have become an historical character. But he 
must needs write a book. It does not make pleas- 
ant reading. It does not make its author a hero. 

It does, however, answer the question the curi- 
ous asked at the time of his appointment: "Why 
did the President make Mr. Lansing Secretary of 
State?" 



226 




© Harris and Ewing 



BOIES PENROSE 



BOIES PENROSE 

The most striking victim of the American 
propensity for exaggeration is the senior Senator 
from Pennsylvania, Boies Penrose. He has a 
personaHty and contour that lend themselves to 
caricature. Only a few deft strokes are needed to 
make his ponderous figure and heavy jowl the 
counterpart of a typical boss, an institution for 
which the American people have a pardonable affec- 
tion in these days of political quackery. For, 
when the worst is said of the imposing array of 
bosses from Tweed down to the present time, they 
could be forgiven much because they were what 
they were. That is why, perhaps, the altogether 
fanciful picture of Penrose, propped on his pillows 
with his telephone at his bedside directing the 
embattled delegates at Chicago, who in sheer 
desperation turned to Warren G. Harding, is dwelt 
upon fondly by a deluded public. 

Penrose does not despise the appurtenances of 

229 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

bossism. If the truth were told he probably likes 
the idea of being represented as the hard-fisted 
master of party destinies. He knows that such a 
reputation inspires awe if not respect, on the part 
of the rank and file, from the humble precinct 
worker to the gentleman of large affairs who pro- 
vides the necessary campaign funds. It has its 
value, sentimental as well as practical, for the 
American people likes to set up its own political 
idols. The politicians who for the moment guide 
the destinies of the nation are so misdrawn, so 
illuminated with virtues and endowed with vices 
quite foreign to them, that they frequently achieve 
a personality qtiite fictitious, but which, none the 
less, passes current in the popular mind as 
genuine. 

Nothing could be more grotesque, for example, 
than the picture of Senator Smoot, who is merely 
a sublimated messenger boy, as one of the arbiters 
of the Republican policies ; or of Senator Lodge, by 
sheer strength of leadership, restraining the dis- 
cordant Republican elements in the Senate from 
kicking over the traces. This is journalist "copy" 
written for a popular imagination which finds the 
truth too tepid. 

Boies Penrose serves the purpose of appeasing 

230 



BOIES PENROSE 

national appetite for what the magazine editors 
call "dynamic stuff." 

But the real Boies Penrose is not all as he is 
pictured. At a ciirsory glance he might appear 
to be a physiological,- psychological, and political 
anachronism. At least he is sufficiently different 
from his colleagues to be, if not actually mysteri- 
ous, not easily understandable. There is some- 
thing fundamental about him. He inspires a 
certain awe which may not be magnetic but has 
the same effect upon those who surround him; 
where he sits is the head of the table. 

I doubt if Lodge or Knox or Hughes could ever 
fathom the secret of his power; they are not cast 
in the same mould. His colleagues smile at his 
idiosyncracies — ^behind his back — but they ap- 
proach him with the respect due to a master. 
Many of them admire him, not a few hate him, but 
all of them fear him. It is rather a singular thing 
that Senator La Follette, himself at the pinnacle 
of his championship of the Wisconsin progressive 
idea, was probably on friendlier terms with the 
senior Senator from Pennsylvania than any of the 
other leaders of those reactionary forces with whom 
he was tilting. He knew where Penrose stood and 
it is not at all improbable that behind the Penrose 

231 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

reticence there was a modicinn of admiration for 
the methods of the redoubtable little colleague, 
who in his way, was a more inexorable boss than 
Penrose himself ever dreamed of being. The 
mutual imder standing was there, even if it never 
became articulate. 

Penrose has peculiarities which put him in a 
niche quite his own. He eschews conversation as 
an idle affectation. He dislikes to shake hands, 
preferring the Chinese fashion of holding his on his 
own expansive paunch. When he finds it nec- 
essary to talk at all he speaks the precise truth as 
he sees it without consideration for the feelings of 
those he happens to be addressing. The results 
are frequently so ludicrous, particularly when he 
enters a colloquy on the Senate floor, that he is 
given credit for a much more pronounced sense of 
himior than he actually possesses. I doubt that 
he is always conscious of the element of humor and 
I suspect that if he realized that his observations 
were to evoke laughter he would deliberately 
choose a less satirical or flippant method of 
expression. 

This temperamental characteristic was illus- 
trated by an episode in the Senate chamber not 
long ago. Penrose, entering, found his chair oc- 

232 



BOIES PENROSE 

cupied by a Democratic colleague who had over- 
estimated his capacity for the doubtful stuff that 
is purveyed in these days of Volsteadism. and whose 
condition was apparent to everyone on the floor 
and in the galleries. Penrose is, perhaps, the most 
widely known personage in the Senate. His tower- 
ing figure makes him conspicuous. But the most 
of the myriads of trippers who visit the Capitol 
do not know one senator from another. They 
rely for identification upon little charts showing 
the arrangements of the seats on the floor each one 
of which is labeled with a senator's name. 

Now Penrose, might or might not have sus- 
pected that these trippers following their charts, 
would pick out the snoring recumbent figure as 
his own. He decided to remove all possibility of 
error and addressing the chair with usual solemnity 
said, "Mr. President, I desire the chair to record 
the fact that the seat of the senior Senator from 
Pennsylvania has not been occupied by himself 
at the present session. It is occupied by another." 
The galleries roared; the somnolent Senator 
shambled over to his own side of the aisle and 
Senator Penrose was given credit, by the unwise, 
for humor quite unintended. 

Life with Mr. Penrose is a much more serious 

233 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

business than most people imagine. And it be- 
came even more serious a little while ago when ill- 
ness laid hold of him and his brother, a physician, 
prescribed dietary rules restricting the freedom 
that he had once exercised without restraint. 
There was something lion-like in the gaunt figure 
in the rolling chair which he occupied when he 
returned to the Senate from his sick bed. It was 
amazing that he recovered ; it was even more amaz- 
ing that he should have submitted to the rigorous 
rules laid down by his doctor, even if that doctor 
was his own brother. The bated breath with 
which Pennsylvania politicians awaited bulletins 
from his bedside was a striking acknowledgment 
of the power he wields. 

The evolution of Boies Penrose is an amusing 
commentary upon American politics in more ways 
than one. Three years after he was graduated 
from Harvard College he was elected to the Penn- 
sylvania State Legislature on a reform ticket. His 
election was made the occasion for great rejoicing 
on the part of the good people of Philadelphia. 
And well might they rejoice. They had at last 
driven a wedge into the sinister political machine 
that had brought the city of brotherly love into 
disrepute as a boss-ridden municipality. 

234 



BOIES PENROSE 

Their young leader had wealth, which has its 
advantages, and social position, which to a Phila- 
delphian is as dear as life itself. Moreover he had 
ability and all that makes for success. His fame 
as a reform leader spread throughout the land and 
across the seas. James Bryce, in his first edition 
of his American Commonwealth cited him as an 
example of the sterling type of young Americans 
who were arousing themselves at that time to 
rescue the mimicipal and state governments from 
the grip of the vicious boss system. 

In the subsequent editions of the American Com- 
monwealth you will find no reference to Mr. Pen- 
rose. Something had happened to him and to the 
reform movement. Whether he was struck by a 
bolt from the heavens or a bolt from Matthew 
Stanley Quay is immaterial. The fact is that 
after a few years' residence in Harrisburg, the 
seat of the government of the commonwealth of 
Pennsylvania, he counseled with himself and 
solemnly decided that Providence had never 
selected him to be the apostle of the political 
millenium. 

Most men are born radicals and die conserva- 
tives. The development is gradual and represents 
the result of years of experience. But Penrose 

235 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

repented while there was time to make amends for 
his error. He sought a very short cut. He went 
directly from the legislatm-e to the Republican 
organization of Philadelphia and stood as its candi- 
date for mayor. But his late friends, the re- 
formers, happened to be in the ascendency that 
year and he was defeated. 

The story told of him at that time, whether true 
or not, that he announced his willingness to take 
as his bride any estimable young lady the organiza- 
tion might select, since the fact that he was a 
bachelor was given by his henchmen as the reason 
of his defeat, is typical of him. The "organiza- 
tion," the Repubhcan Party, constitutes his po- 
litical creed and philosophy. He has devoted his 
life to it. The "party" is his life, his reHgion, his 
family, his hobby. Down in his soul he believes 
that the destiny of the American people is so 
inextricably interwoven with its fortunes that its 
destruction would be nothing less than national 
hari kari. 

He does not believe that the Republican Party 
is perfect, but he beHeves that it is as perfect as 
any political organization is ever hkely to be. He 
has no illusions concerning the men it chooses for 
high places. He is never disturbed by stories of 

236 



BOIES PENROSE 

political corruption or graft unless they are serious 
enough to jeopardize forthcoming elections. 
Otherwise they are merely unpleasant incidents 
that arise in the life of every business organization. 

If he were supreme he would not tolerate politi- 
cal corruption, any more than he would tolerate 
murder; but since he is not supreme and cannot 
dictate to all men, he accepts their efforts in the 
interest of the organization even though their hands 
may be slightly soiled. Like the wise general who 
raises a volunteer army he is not meticulous in the 
choice of his privates, providing they are capable of 
performing the tasks assigned to them. No seeker 
after souls ever believed the end justifies the means 
more sincerely than Boies Penrose believes his 
vote-seekers are justified in stretching the code a 
bit for the benefit of the organization — particularly 
if it is actually endangered. 

Just as he believes in the Republican Party he 
believes in a high tariff — the higher the better. 
Prosperity without protection is inconceivable. 
During a Washington career of more than twenty 
years he has been constantly caricatured as the 
tool of the interests — the man upon whom they 
could rely to raise the tariff wall an inch or two for 
their personal benefit. 

237 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

He has raised it whenever he has had the oppor- 
tvinity to do so, but not for the reason assigned. 
He is no man's tooh The suggestion that Boies 
Penrose personally has ever profited financially 
through politics is too absurd to be entertained for 
a moment. Of course, he expects the interests, 
whom the party serves with tariff protection, to 
save the party at the polls and they usually do so. 
But that in the opinion of the senior Senator from 
Pennsylvania is the essence of sound politics. 

Unbelievable as it may soimd in these days. 
Senator Penrose actually thinks that most men 
are dependent for their daily bread upon the suc- 
cess of a very small group of financiers, magnates, 
or whatever you care to call the great leaders of the 
world of business. 

Years of experience has convinced him that 
the himian race is composed, for the most part, of 
hopelessly improvident people and that a great 
part of the globe would be depopulated through 
starvation and disease if it were not for the fore- 
sight, ability, and thrift of the handful of leaders 
whom Divine Providence has provided. He looks 
upon himself as one of the instruments of Provi- 
dence and he sincerely believes that the policies 
which he has supported since his early experience 

238 



BOIES PENROSE 

with the reformers are responsible for the happi- 
ness and prosperity of many a family. He wotild 
consider it the height of absurdity for any of these 
poor, worthy, but ignorant people to expect the 
comforts which they have enjoyed without the pro- 
tection afforded their employers by the Republican 
Party. 

By this somewhat unpopular method of reason- 
ing, he believes that he of all the men in public life 
has made the most persistent and consistent fight 
for the masses. It is imdoubtedly this calm faith 
and sincere belief in his own rectitude which has 
enabled him to hold the tremendous power he has 
exerted since Nelson Aldrich retired from the 
Senate. 

I have presented his political philosophy in some 
detail because he is probably the most misjudged 
man in Washington. People are inclined to look 
upon him as a glorified boss who deals in politics as 
other men deal in commodities ; — it is hardly a fair 
estimate of the man. He considers himself the 
chosen leader of the most intelligent people of a 
great commonwealth who is rendering tremen- 
dous service to the country. I do not agree with 
that estimate either. But taken all and all it 
seems to me that the country owes him a debt of 

239 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

gratitude for having been sincere when another 
course would have been more profitable. It is a 
relief to find one at least who has never been called 
a hypocrite. 

Senator Penrose does not hate Democrats; he 
does not consider them important enough for that ; 
he merely despises them. They are to his mind an 
inferior class of himian beings who should not be 
intrusted with the affairs of the nation. Reformers 
irritate him. They are either self-seeking hypo- 
crites or deluded. In neither case has he the time 
nor inclination to listen to their suggestions or 
heed their maledictions. 

He had an abiding hatred for Theodore Roose- 
velt when he was in the White House, but he sup- 
ported him loyally so long as he was the leader of 
the Party. When Colonel Roosevelt bolted the 
hatred ran the last gamut. He was classed as an 
arch criminal for having smashed the organization. 

Penrose is an enigma to those who know him 
only casually, especially those who view life 
through the rose glasses of culture. They marvel 
at the extent to which he has been able to dictate 
to men who appear to be his superiors. I have 
heard him called a cave man by some, by others a 
boor ; but he is neither. He observes the amenities 

240 



BOIES PENROSE 

of life so far as they are necessary, but only so far. 
He is impatient of mediocrity ; he will not tolerate 
stupidity and he loathes hypocrisy. I would not 
say that he has bad manners; he has none at all. 

Throughout the recent eclipse of the Republican 
Party, which began with the Roosevelt default, no 
member remained more steadfast than the Penn- 
sylvania leader. He accepted the inevitable and 
bided his time like the politicians of the old school 
of which he is one of the few conspicuous sirrviving 
examples. Expediency does not enter into his 
make-up; he made no effort to keep himself in the 
limelight, for he is by the Party, of the Party, and 
for the Party. 

Now that the Party is back again, in power, more 
than one of his colleagues suspect that Penrose, 
if his health permits, will emerge from the back- 
groimd as the real leader of the Senate majority. 
His poHtical past is against him. But he knows 
men and his tutelage imder Aldrich has not been 
forgotten. 



i6 241 




Harris and Ewing 



WILLIAM EDGAR BORAH 



WILLIAM E. BORAH 

Taken at its best, life, to William E. Borah, is 
little more than a troublesome pilgrimage to the 
grave. 

This does not mean that he is a misanthrope or a 
seer of distorted vision. On the contrary his sym- 
pathies are broad and he has an elusive charm, 
more apparent in the early years of his political 
career than now. But, for some reason, probably 
temperamental, he is in the habit of dwelling upon 
the dangers that beset the republic— dangers which 
are sometimes very real. Nevertheless an hour 
in his presence is more often than not depressing; it 
leaves one with a sense of impending calamity. 
There are few bright spots on his horizon. 

It is not altogether to his discredit that his more 
venerable colleagues look upon him as a yoimg 
man— he is fifty-six; nor does it imply merely 
arrested political development. For all of his 
pessimism he maintains a certain freshness, if 

245 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

belligerency, of spirit which is puzzling not only to 
those who have long since accustomed themselves 
to the party yoke but to those whom experience 
has taught the art of compromise. For Borah 
hates the discipline that organization entails, in 
spite of his respect for organization, and he dis- 
likes compromise however often he is driven to it. 

This may be accoimted for by the fact that he 
was not obliged to fight his way laboriously up- 
ward on the lower rungs of politics — he landed in 
the Senate from an Idaho law office in one pyro- 
technical leap when he was only forty two — and by 
the fact that in his make-up he is singularly un- 
political. Disassociating him from his senatorial 
environment it is much easier to imagine him as a 
devotee of academic culture, a university professor, 
a moral crusader, even a poet, than as a politician. 

There is in his make-up an underlying Celtic 
strain which may account for his moodiness, his 
emotionalism, and his impulsiveness. These char- 
acteristics are constantly cropping up. For many 
years he has buried himself in a somber suite of 
rooms in the Senate office building as far away 
from his colleagues as he could get. There he 
lives in an atmosphere of academic quiet. There 
he reads and studies incessantly, far from the mad- 

246 



WILLIAM E. BORAH 

dening crowd of politics. This detachment has 
probably bred a suspicion that marks his actions. 
He has no intimates, no associates who call him 
"Bill." He is not a social being. He is rarely- 
seen where men and women congregate. He is 
virtually unknown in that strange bedlam com- 
posed largely of social climbers and official poseurs 
called Washington society. He neither smokes, 
drinks, nor plays. What relaxation he gets is on 
the back of a western nag in Rock Creek Park 
where he may be seen any morning cantering along 
— alone. He does not ride for pleasure ; his physi- 
cian ordered it and it is a very businesslike matter. 
If he experiences any of the exhilaration that comes 
to men in the saddle he contrives to conceal it. 

On the floor of the Senate he is quite a different 
person. There his immistakable genius for oratory 
is given full sweep and when he speaks his col- 
leagues usually listen, not because they agree with 
what he says but because they are charmed by the 
easy and melodious flow of his words. There is a 
hint of Ingersoll in his speeches which are full of 
alliteration and rhythmic phrases. He has a sense 
of form sadly lacking in his stammering and in- 
articulate colleagues, for oratory in the Senate is 
probably at its lowest ebb. But, strangely enough, 

247 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

it is only occasionally that he makes a lasting im- 
pression. His eloquence ripples like water and 
leaves scarcely more trace. 

Mr. Borah's entire political career has been char- 
acterized by an impulsiveness which has given him 
a halo of popularity but has never enabled him to 
gamer the fruits of plodding labor. At one time 
or another this has led him to break with nearly 
every faction with which he has been identified. 
The "regular" Republicans have felt that they 
never could rely upon him; the "progressive" 
element has found him inconstant and at intervals 
he has threatened to pull down the party house of 
the Republicans and to bring destruction to one 
or other of the leaders whom he dislikes. 

This was illustrated by an observation he made 
to me one spring morning in 1919 when the Re- 
publican attitude toward the League of Nations 
was still in the formative process. Borah was 
"convinced" that Elihu Root and Will H. Hays 
were conspiring to induce the Republicans to 
accept the League and he said, quite seriously, 
that he had about come to the conclusion that it 
woiold be necessary to wreck the Republican Party 
to save the country. Root, he told me, was pro- 
British to the last degree and Hays, he said, was 

248 



WILLIAM E. BORAH 

cajoled by the great international bankers who 
trembled at the delay of peace. 

"If such men are to lead the Republican Party," 
he declared, "the sooner it is destroyed the better." 

Of course, he did not take the stump. He has 
failed so often to carry out his threats of rebellion 
that they no longer inspire the fear they once did. 
Although he has repeatedly turned against the 
organization he has managed to escape being an 
outlaw. This singular trait of political conserva- 
tism came conspicuously into play in 191 2 when 
Roosevelt turned upon the machine. All through 
the stormy days of that stormy Chicago conven- 
tion Senator Borah could be fotmd at the side of 
that one leader for whom he had a consistent 
regard. He was with him up to the very last 
moment before the die was cast. He was almost 
successful at the eleventh hour in inducing Mr. 
Roosevelt to abandon his mad project. They 
were closeted together on the evening of the 
clamorous meeting of the progressives in a hotel 
across the street. 

"We have come to the parting of the ways. 
Colonel," Borah said to his chief. "This far I 
have gone with you. I can go no further." He 
urged Roosevelt not to take the step which would 

249 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

mean the disruption of the party and defeat. 
Roosevelt wavered. But before he could reach 
the decision Borah sought a committee from the 
outlaw meeting, burst into the room, and enthusi- 
astically announced that the stage was set for the 
demonstration that was to mark a new political 
era. 

Roosevelt, hat in hand, turned to Borah and 
said, "You see, I can't desert my friends now." 
The ex-President went his way and Borah came 
back to the old Republican fold. 

From that time to this he has followed his own 
way which, fortimately for the Republican Party, 
has been within organization limits, but his rela- 
tions with his fellows are neither intimate nor 
serene. Some of the Republicans, who can be 
forgiven for not understanding a man who re- 
respects neither party decrees nor traditions, feel 
that Borah is so American that he possesses one 
of the characteristics of the aboriginal Indian — in 
other words, that he is cunning, that he will not 
play the game according to organization rules. He 
has a habit of making too many mental reserva- 
tions. I am not quite sure that these allegations 
could be supported before an impartial tribimal. 
I am rather inclined to the belief that to maintain 

250 



WILLIAM E. BORAH 

his position in the Senate Borah has had to become 
a shrewd trader. 

Fortunately for himself he is too much of a per- 
sonage to be ignored or suppressed, and manages 
to be a power in a party which has no love for him. 

He is virtually a party to himself. He cannot 
be controlled by the ordinary political methods. 
His constituency is small and evidently devoted to 
him and his state is remote ; he is not compelled to 
do the irksome political chores that cost Senators 
their political independence. However doubtful 
he might be as a positive asset his dexterity and 
power of expression are such that he would be very 
dangerous as a liability. A report that Borah is 
on the rampage affects Republican leaders very 
much as a run on a bank affects financial leaders. 
They are not quite sure when either is going to 
stop. Borah knows that most of the men with 
whom he is dealing are clay and estimates with 
imcanny accuracy the degree to which he can 
compel them to meet his demands. 

This method has not always been successful. 
It was singularly unsuccessful in the case of Sena- 
tor Penrose. Borah is the antithesis of Penrose, 
whom he dislikes intensely. Several years ago he 
interpreted a remark made by the Senator from 

251 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

Pennsylvania to another Senator as a thrust at his 
own poHtical ethics, or lack of them. It was a 
petty affair at most and Penrose never admitted 
the accuracy of Borah's construction, but Borah 
has had nothing to do with him since. When the 
present Congress was in process of organization 
Borah announced that he would bolt the party 
caucus if Penrose were slated for the chairmanship 
of the Finance Committee to which he was en- 
titled according to the rule of seniority. It was a 
ticklish situation. The Republicans had a bare 
majority in the Senate and if any of them deserted 
the organization it might mean Democratic con- 
trol. The leaders were disturbed and tried to 
mollify the defiant Senator from Idaho with every 
means at hand even giving assiirance that the 
Senator from Pennsylvania would vote against the 
Peace Treaty and the League of Nations which was 
supposed to represent his vital interest at that time. 
He refused to compromise and announced that 
Penrose must go. He was offered every committee 
assignment that he or his friends wanted, and 
accepted them, but as a matter of right. 

Penrose was determined not to be displaced to 
satisfy what he regarded as a colleague's whim. 
He sat silent in his office receiving reports from 

252 



WILLIAM E. BORAH 

hour to hour on Borah's state of mind. On the 
day before the caucus Borah whispered that he 
intended to make charges against the Pennsyl- 
vania leader that would provide a sensation re- 
gardless of any effect they might have upon the 
party or the country. The report was brought to 
Penrose. Instead of trembling he sent word to 
Borah that he might say what he pleased concern- 
ing his political career but that if he made any 
personal charges he would regret them to his dying 
day. Borah appeared to understand. He did 
not even attend the caucus and Penrose was duly 
elected. Whether he was trading for committee 
assignments or initiated the fight on political 
groimds is a question he alone can answer, if 
anyone should have the temerity to ask it. 

The same violence of his likes and dislikes is 
shown in his attitude toward the British and his 
espousal of the Irish cause. At the time of the 
visit of the British mission to Washington, Vice- 
President Marshall designated Senator Borah a 
member of the committee appointed to escort the 
British visitors into the chamber. This Borah 
resented as a personal affront. 

"Marshall has a distorted sense of htmior," he 
said. "He knows I dislike the British and that I 

253 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

despise the hypocrite Balfour." This feeHng was 
probably due in large measure to the Irish lineage 
which Borah can trace in his ancestry as well as a 
temperamental dislike of the British methods of 
maintaining control over subject peoples. 

It is difficult to label Senator Borah from a poli- 
tical standpoint. His most striking characteristic 
is his inconsistency. For a long time in the early 
days of the progressive movement he displayed a 
marked inclination to be "irregular " and he is to be 
found voting for most measiu'es for which the "pro- 
gressives" claimed sponsorship, but when the more 
radical leaders began to advocate the recall of 
the judiciary, Borah rose up and delivered an 
invective the memory of which lingers in the 
Capitol. It was one of the few speeches he has 
made that had a permanent effect and, strangely 
enough, it was the kind of speech that might have 
well been delivered by Root or Knox. 

There has always been reason to believe that 
Borah was never more enamored of La Follette 
in his prime, or of Hiram Johnson, than he has been 
of the "reactionary" leaders with whom he has 
been oftentimes in open conflict. When the latter 
deluded himself with the hope of securing the Re- 
publican nomination, Borah was supposed to be 

254 



WILLIAM E. BORAH 

his chief supporter. When Johnson had eHmi- 
nated Lowden and Wood, and seemed to have 
eliminated Harding, Borah showed more interest 
in the Knox candidacy. He wanted Knox at the 
head of the ticket mainly because he knew that 
Knox was an implacable foe of the League of 
Nations. On that fateful Friday night in Chicago 
when the signs of the trend toward Harding had 
begim to appear, the Senator from Idaho was 
anxious and prepared to place Knox's name in 
nomination and begged Johnson to swing his 
delegates in that direction. 

Borah has succeeded very well in concealing his 
own ambitions, possibly because he is more cautious 
than some of his impetuous colleagues, or because 
the opportunity has never come for an avowal. 
But among those who have followed his career 
there is a very strong suspicion that his one great 
desire was to be the successor of Roosevelt. This 
might be one reason for his antagonism toward the 
politicians of the old regime, such as Penrose, who 
have barred his way in that direction, and his fitful 
devotion to progressivism championed by others. 
The failiu-e to realize this ambition might account 
in some measure for his later reticence and his 
suspicion of politicians in general. He has shown 

255 



THE MIRRORS OF WASHINGTON 

a pronounced distrust of them. The only ex- 
ception has been the audacious Ambassador to the 
Court of Saint James who in his Review and in his 
Weekly flattered the Senator from Idaho with an 
absence of restraint that might have made a more 
trusting person skeptical. 

The Senator from Idaho has too many years 
before him to justify predictions concerning his 
career. Whatever faults he might have they do 
not entirely obscure his virtues. It is possible 
that the occasion might arise for him to serve as 
the spokesman of a popular cause, which he would 
do with undoubted earnestness and eloquence, in 
which event he might still become a dominating 
figure in American politics. 



256 



^ 



Ji Selection from the 
Catalogue of 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 



Complete Catalogues sent 
on application 



The Mirrors of Downing Street 

By "A Gentleman with a Duster" 

8vo. With 12 Portraits 

A selection from a host of reviews of an amazing and 
brilliant volume: 

" Since Lytton Strachey shocked and amused us by his Eminent Victorians, no 
book written by an Englishman has been so audacious, so reckless, so clever, 
and so full of prejudices, apparently based on principles." — Maurice Francis 
Egan in the New York Times. 

"Of fascinating interest, with a style pungent and epigrammatic . . . does not 
contain a dull line . . . there is scarcely one of the great controversies which 
agitated British political waters during and since the war that is not touched 
on . . . the author is partisan in his friendships, and he is a good hater, so 
his work is altogether engaging," — New York Herald. 

"A very serious book, without being heavy, a daring work, without being 
reckless. It is judicial in tone, endeavoring to give each man his due, setting 
down naught in malice or partiality ... a work of keen interest and highly 
illuminating. " — Cincinnati Times-Star. 

"This book of scintillating wit and almost uncanny power of vivid phrase- 
making." — N, Y. Evening Mail. 

"Some of his characterizations fairly take one's breath away. His epigrams 
are as skillful as those of ' E. T. Raymond,* and his analysis is reminiscent of 
Lytton Strachey. . . . This book has created a sensation in England, it will 
create another in America." — News-Leader, Richmond, Va. 

"It is a book that every intelligent person should read, dispelling, as it does, 
a number of the illusions to which war conditions have given birth ... the 
book is one to be read for its light on specific facts and on individual men. 
Often the author's least elaborated statements are the most startling . . . 
it is written with the vim and audacity of Lytton Strachey's Eminent 
Victorians, and it has in addition a very vivid news interest, and it is just 
both in its iconoclasm and in its frank hero worship — of the right heroes." 
— Chicago Post. 

"It is one of the few cases of a startling work being also a fine piece of 
literature ... the author is obviously on the inside. No merely imaginative 
person could have produced such a picture gallery." — N. Y. Evening Telegram. 
"One of the most interesting studies that has been presented to English 
or American public." — Troy Record. 



New York G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS London 



By the Author of 

"The Mirrors of Downing Street" 

THE GLASS OF 
FASHION 

SOME SOCIAL REFLECTIONS 

The Author prefers to remain anonymous 
He signs himself 

A GENTLEMAN WITH A DUSTER 

With Portraits 

" The Gentleman with a Duster " who so mercilessly 
and brilliantly clarified the mirrors of Downing Street, 
now turns his attention to English Society — and what a 
drubbing it gets. Perhaps the sorriest victims to fall 
under his cleanser are Col. Repington and Margot 
Asquith. His name for the latter will surely stick — " The 
Grandmother of the Flapper." But society at large is 
not spared, and there can be no question as to the sin- 
cerity of the author. The Spectator, realizing this, says, 
" The book is not a piece of mere Grubb Street morality 
prepared by someone who thinks that this is the dish the 
public desires at the moment." 

The Glass of Fashion is at times savagely ferocious, but 
it scintillates brilliancy throughout. 

NEW YORK G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS london 



AT THE 
SUPREME WAR COUNCIL 

By 
CAPTAIN PETER E. WRIGHT 

Late Assistant Secretary. Supreme War Council 

8 Portraits 



"A Literary Blast Which Shook All England" 

It will shake America, too, these revelations whose author 
knew the intimate records and, as interpreter, participated 
in the conferences of those overlords of the Great War, 
the Supreme War Council members. 

World secrets are bared and great reputations crumpled. 
Idols of Britain and of France, Haig, Robertson, Maurice, 
and Petain are pictured as creatures of clay with Repington 
abetting their sorry projects. The illusion of Allied numer- 
ical inferiority is shattered. Superior in numbers almost 
always, the Allied inferiority lay in generalship alone 
(before Foch), says the author. 

Captain Wright lifts the veil. Logic, statistics, and 
apparent proof substantiate his statements. Whether 
right or wrong, wise or otherwise, certainly he is fearless. 
"If my charges are false," he says, "let them sue me for 
libel. Then all the facts will come out! " 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

Ne^v York London 



v:*^ 



EMINENT VICTORIANS 

By LYTTON STRACHEY 

8vo. With Portraits 

A selection from a host of reviews of this brilliant and 
extraordinarily witty book : 

The New York Times — "There is every temptation to quote from this 
volume, for it abounds in striking stories and brilliant interpretations. 
. . . Mr. Strachey has not written history in the usual fashion, but he 
has made a notable contribution to that prodigious undertaking, the 
history of the Victorian Age." 
The OuUook— " Brilliant." 

The Metropolitan — " It is one of the few current books that I would 
specially recommend as worth reading. He is a refreshing, brave, witty, 
and large-minded biographer." — Clarence Day, Jr. 

The Chicago Daily N^ws — " Lytton Strachey can write circles around 
any living biographer; can give handicaps to any living essayist and 
match the most touted workers in the language with one hand tied 
behind his back. . . . When you have read the last line of these soul- 
portraits you are aware of the stark truthfulness of the work. It is not 
only art — it is reality." 

The New York Tribune — " We receive Mr, Strachey's volume with 
gratitude and joy. . . . Profound sincerity of both constructive and 
destructive criticism, sanity of judgment and splendor of spirit make 
this volume a memorable tribute to one of the most memorable eras 
in the history of the human intellect." 

The Chicago Tribune — " One of the outstanding biographical works in 
English literature. ... In a generation that produces one Strachey 
there bob up several thousand professional mourners, who model their 
style and general appreciation of the truth upon epitaphs. . . . Strachey 
wields one of the most engaging pens now employed in literature. His 
humor is unfailing, but always smooth, unforced, ironic. He knows the 
satiric value of hyperbole and antithesis. His book is altogether a 
remarkable performance, ... In his gallery are portraits of familiar 
personages wearing new expressions, and the manner of presentation 
is that of a cultivated and penetrating artist. The volume is recom- 
mended eagerly to all lovers of vivid and daring biography." 
The Springfield Republican—" Mr. Strachey's wit gives stimulating 
piquancy to a style at once brilliant and pure. His power of illuminat- 
ing the figures which he presents is matched by his ability to interest 
the reader in his craftmanship," 

The Hartford Times—" Under M "poi^^ fac§,Qad*illuminating pen 
dry-as-dust facts become of absftA)ingTftWrest.^It'is Astonishing what 
he can do to make a * life ' worth reading," 

The Indianapolis News — "Mr. Strachey has succeeded notably in 
making biography more dramatic and fascinating than fiction." 



Newtork " G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS London 








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